Slaying the Meta Dragon

[Spartan 4,402]

Needed a vhl.com for the week, what better topic to cover than the recent rollout of hybrid attributes from a BoG lens?

 

- We were fairly certain from the start that we didn't want archetypes. One archetype would end up becoming meta, or we would be limiting people from building the way they choose. I think there was proposals in public of a seesaw balance between SC and PA/DF, which would mean that if you wanted 99 SC you'd sacrifice all your DF or something along those lines. We knew that it would demolish the effectiveness of players who wanted high SC, so we scrapped that idea fairly quickly.

 

- Increasing the update scale was also proposed, specifically at the higher end. We didn't want to go the EFL/SBA route where you have to bank for a week or two just to increase an attribute point by 1. That's mainly caused by an overreliance on a single attribute, and we just didn't want to make people sit and wait to increase attributes. We also recognized the meta build of 40/99/99 would still exist, probably in a more severe form if we increased the update scale. It'd be more costly and require more TPE, but it could still exist on a single line which defeated the purpose a bit - therefore we wanted to eliminate it's possibility entirely.

 

- Overall it was a lot of work and lot of credit goes to Bek for mainly spearheading the need for change and then Eno for the specifics of it.

[Shindigs 1,771]

15 hours ago, Spartan said:

- Overall it was a lot of work and lot of credit goes to Bek for mainly spearheading the need for change and then Eno for the specifics of it.

And ofc to the Moscow LR for being the premiere source of meta related activity spikes.

 

The actual finished product has already been a lot of fun to play around with in your spreadsheet. There really are quite a few ways to go about things, sure Offensive Vision is absurdly powerful and everyone will get it no matter what their build is (other than pure enforcer). But that really couldn't be avoided since PA and SC had to be on the same attribute to stop 40/99s, but that also by default creates an attribute that everyone wants/needs. If I had to guess at anything that may be touched in the future, it's how efficient that attribute is. Though with now inefficient almost all the other ones are, I guess having one actual good one does make sense.