The way the unlocking system for feats in elimination means that a team or player who is already doing better then his opponents gets an even greater advantage over them in subsecuent rounds. Making it harder for the losing team to make an effective comeback.
My suggestion is that every round the game progresses 1 more level of feats unlock for all players instead of renown score.
So round 1 should have everybody start with no feats unlocked.
the second round will have everyone unlock their 1st feat.
In the third round everyone unlocks their 2th feat.
fourth round unlocks the 3th feat.
and lastly the fifth round will unlock the 4th feat for everyone.
This way the losing team wont get a disatvantage based on previusly played rounds.
Please let me know what you guys think about this suggestion.
Greetings,
Fruttie
There are many issues with feats. I believe the problem stems from the imbalance of feats and there relative power. For example, revenge attacks is a tier 2 feat that allows you to fill your revenge gauge by attacking as well as defending. It is fairly widespread through the player base that Revenge, while a good mechanic, is overpowered in implementation. Compare this to another second tier feat, Thick Blood. A passive feat that is absolutely useless unless you are fighting a PK or Nobushi and then brutally powerful against those two. Since you don't know in advance who you are fighting, this becomes a dice roll for the Warden with the odds in favor of it being useless. This trend continues with higher tier feats as a PK 4th tier deals 120 damage to the player that killed her and catapults can be dropped on enemies essentially one shotting the foe and doing a small to moderate amount of damage to any ally. Other tier 4 feats however have very minimal effects, such as area debuffs or heals over time. Having a nearly guaranteed revenge kill if you lose versus having an area debuff that the foe can merely step out of are not really comparable.
I understand that the intent is to give the sense of progression as you play each game but it is too simple and unbalancing. It is my assertion that the feats need to be reworked altogether. My ideal system would involve the ability to select the feat on level up. This could be accomplished by slotting 3 feat options per tier and when the unlock condition is met, the player uses down d-pad to bring up the choices and the other 3 to select the next feat. In addition, feats should be a lot less potent across the board but have a greater use frequency. It could even be that all feats are available from the outset and leveling up allows an upgrade, resets the feats to full or gives an additional use. For this to be more fair, the feat options should be more equivalent. I would say having a few generic feat choices for all characters on each tier and then only a couple specific ones to choose from would be far better.
As to the whole rich get richer issue from rewarding those winning with more tools to win with, I believe that merely making the feats less game changing would go a long way toward fixing this increased imbalance while still giving a reward for those doing well. If your continuously losing fight after fight such that they have tier 4 to your tier 1 unlock, chances are the feats aren't really making the difference. A big concern with feat progression that is related to another topic: renown gains. The easiest way to unlock feats fast is to kill snipe. Even if your teammate does 98% of the damage to a foe, getting the last hit awards you the kill and you gain far more renown for almost no effort or risk. This effectively means that a quick character such as peacekeeper can wait for the moment to jump in with a quick hit and gain easily twice the renown of the true winner of that fight. This encourages selfish play. So while I agree an alternate means to unlock feats would be nice, simply correcting this deficiency and renown gain in general would really help even out the progression per game.