- Posts
- 84
- Likes
- 247
If you wanna give him free acm.
Discrimination against Blue users
- Thread starter Vegeta
- Start date
- Posts
- 1,166
- Likes
- 2,138
I'm gonna note something about the current dueling system.
It's broken.
If I play cyan or purple, blue or staff, I can faceroll and almost full BP people that I would normally go 60/40 against in yellow vs yellow. That's not because I am somehow alot better with cyan or purple, but simply because the system is broken. Perks and ACM and all sorts of weird invisible mechanics make it extremely hard to balance the different saber styles and so many broken mechanics overlap, bugs abound and it's in general quite a mess. That's why 'hardcore' duelists mostly just stick to yellow these days and play nothing else.
It's sad really, we used to have alot more style variety in the dueling scene pre-ACM change aswell as pre-cyan/purple but now style changing has been killed off by ACM and perks + similar AP/BP values for all styles have made the styles feel more or less the same, where before it felt quite different blue vs red, one having speedy low AP attacks with alot of BP, the other dealing massive damage but having way less BP. There were trade-offs for each style, and sometimes it was a case of rock-paper-scissors. That cannot be helped and may in-fact be a good thing, since if you try to make all styles exactly equally balanced you end up melding them together and destroying their uniqueness.
It's broken.
If I play cyan or purple, blue or staff, I can faceroll and almost full BP people that I would normally go 60/40 against in yellow vs yellow. That's not because I am somehow alot better with cyan or purple, but simply because the system is broken. Perks and ACM and all sorts of weird invisible mechanics make it extremely hard to balance the different saber styles and so many broken mechanics overlap, bugs abound and it's in general quite a mess. That's why 'hardcore' duelists mostly just stick to yellow these days and play nothing else.
It's sad really, we used to have alot more style variety in the dueling scene pre-ACM change aswell as pre-cyan/purple but now style changing has been killed off by ACM and perks + similar AP/BP values for all styles have made the styles feel more or less the same, where before it felt quite different blue vs red, one having speedy low AP attacks with alot of BP, the other dealing massive damage but having way less BP. There were trade-offs for each style, and sometimes it was a case of rock-paper-scissors. That cannot be helped and may in-fact be a good thing, since if you try to make all styles exactly equally balanced you end up melding them together and destroying their uniqueness.
- Posts
- 44
- Likes
- 49
Yeah I'm still using it and already have done what you suggested. I wasn't complaining about being lamed for using it, I just wanted to know why people think it is overpowered
- Posts
- 1,166
- Likes
- 2,138
Blue has lightning fast halfswings and scales really well with ACM. You're also rewarded extra for PB'ing with it. These things make blue very deadly in the hands of someone skilled at the game. Unless you reach a certain level you're not going to see the true strength of blue. Of course, mid-tier players these days don't have a clue how to play vs fast styles like cyan and blue, and often get interrupt-spammed because of their lack of sense of timing. I think that's why lesser skilled duelists consider it to be overpowered.
Once you overcome the timing gap, it's easy enough to beat blue users that aren't very skilled. But once you face someone very skilled, blues mish-mash of mechanics once more come together and it becomes quite difficult to beat because it just keeps getting stronger the entire duel unless you play to drain ACM, but that is also tough cuz blue can halfswing spam so fast or do double hit combos and retreat, using its PB perk from range.
I think you're most likely experiencing people who just have no sense of timing and just get interrupted by blue, thus thinking that it's OP for that reason but the reality is that there is more to it, though ofc fast swings are strong, but I believe that it's the other mechanics such as ACM that truly make it broken. It would be far less strong without ACM, cuz then you have more time to patiently time your counter-swings when fighting back against the spam.
- Posts
- 368
- Likes
- 535
I have to admit I am the type of player SeV described above. I think I'm decent in yellow vs yellow but when facing blue I literally freeze and have no idea what to do. I try to pbcounter or parry but I always end up being interrupted no matter what I try. I also have troubles even getting the PB as I can barely tell which swing is it cuz it's really fast. And I don't have much time to fix the mistakes cuz ACM gets built up fast and I'm a goner. 
- Posts
- 866
- Likes
- 774
People using blue are usually awful runners - when they are about to die they will hide behind team or make it impossible to finish them. If it's the opposite and you are being chased they will spam [W] swing until they get you from behind lol. Maybe it isn't that blue is so scary if you get to fight it without anything bothering you but that's hardly the case.
- Posts
- 368
- Likes
- 535
Ah well I am talking about duel mode actually. In Open I don't really stick by the "house" rules of "yellow only" "no hit and run" "no force" "no jump" etc and do various things to gain the edge so I can deal with blue there in a different way. But in duel mode when I face blue I genuinely struggle. Against decent players at least, newbies are not a problem.
- Posts
- 827
- Likes
- 938
You're not alone with your struggling against blue, but then again I'm probably just one of the many 'mid-tiers' who have bad timing so what do i know, maybe the 15 year players will bestow some of their unreachable dueling knowledge upon us!!!
or you know, blue's interrupts are actually a problem and the masses of people that complain about it aren't bad at the game, as a certain someone is trying to suggest
- Posts
- 1,166
- Likes
- 2,138
There are a few approaches to balancing fast styles vs slow styles and dealing with the interrupt stuff.
Some people advocate for slowing down the styles, remaking their animations, making certain swings cause spinning attacks and so on, generally impacting the feeling of using fast styles negatively in some way or other. Although I disapprove of this for blue style, I am still of the opinion that cyan would do better as a medium style.
The other way to balance fast styles vs heavy styles is to focus on their strong point and tune down other factors. For fast styles that would be their swingspeed and for heavy styles it would be their swing damage. The focus should be on these things.
However, things immediately become far more problematic when you have ACM to worry about. Further exacerbating this is the fact that blue and red for example, don't have very different AP/BP like in the past. As I explained before, it is the fast swings + ACM reliant meta that causes such problems, because it means you are forced to attack back all the time or fall behind and be slowly ground down by a building ACM avalanche. The popular dunning-kruger solution to this is to want to normalize everything, slow swings down and add spins etc, which basically just ruins blue style and makes everything feel the same. Oh but we have perks. 10% more parry damage or whatever, is somehow going to fix things. Yes yes.
The dynamic to deal with blue should be simple to understand. Avoid getting interrupted by blue swings, defend and wait for a gap then press back with a swingblock combo. Use footwork to make it more difficult for blue to attack you (at range blue is weaker).
^ This should be how blue is dealt with, it should be the core of blue vs other style (yellow) gameplay. But when you add in ACM + perks, things become way more difficult to handle and balance and I hope I don't have to lay it out to you why that is.
As another example, let us take red style. Imagine a big, heavy hitter with low BP (weak defense but high offense). Now the dynamic changes again. You shouldn't be able to fight all styles the same way and win! Now, It's suddenly about dodging/PBing/parrying those big meaty swings and weaving in and out between them as you try to hit red in the bounce anim to drain alot of BP. The frequency of attacks is lower, but each attack matters more. All of this is erased, blurred and almost done away with if you introduce public-style ACM and tweak the AP/BP values to be near each other which is what happened. Thus you end up with a system where all the styles are kind of the same thing, just with different swingspeeds and perks and people fight blue the same way they fight yellow and wonder why blue is so strong and why they are getting raped.
---
Finally the thing about interrupts. Being forced to play a short block anim every time you are hit/interrupted and so on, is the problem in this case. Not fast swings vs slow swings. This issue is easily dealt with by reducing the frequency of block anims being played and defining when they are played. You should still be punished for noobishly starting a swing up close and getting hit in your start-up anim as 'mid-tiers' (noel) are wont to do. I don't think it should be perma-lockdown to fight against a blue user in close range, but that problem stems from block anims being played too frequently in wrong scenarios. Something that I think should be fixed, and will be fixed.
DaloLorn
Movie Battles II Team Retired
- Posts
- 408
- Likes
- 261
- Posts
- 280
- Likes
- 250
Shirt discrimination against blue user ?
what the hell even is this
- Posts
- 280
- Likes
- 250
A muscular bodypillow, that's obvious.
what the hell even is THIS?