New Player, lasted 4 weeks, done. (long, constructive)
This post meant for community development team (if such exists in FOR HONOR). I think it is important to let developers know, why i as a average player leave the game, and what exactly pushed me to this decesion.
I played for 89 hours over the course of 4 weeks, i got one hero to rep 8, 6 others to rep 1, i bought full hero package and tried all heroes at least once. I tried to love this game, it has great concept, it's pretty, i loved the customization aspect of heroes and how there are factions from various cultures. However when it came to game play, the game has major flaws and dis balances which i will list below with explanations where necessary.
I am an average player, i play for fun, when i have time, i do tend to game 20-30 hours a week. Fun in game is of prime importance to me as im an adult and want to relax after work, therefore i do not play to boost my e-pin, i do not play to prove some one anything, i do not play to be top 1 on ladder and etc. I however dont mind grinding for cosmetics, or other things that would give more strength/advantage in battle for my hero.
The things that pushed me away from the game:
1)Hero balance
- berserker, after you get to rep 2-3, playing this character becomes hell, all his attacks are too easy to predict, too easy to parry and dodge. Hero has nothing going for him, just a lot of disadvantages that are not counter balanced in other areas. I would assume he would at least have 20% extra damage, considering his attacks are so slow and so predictable. Also has extremely boring chains, no viable light chain. basically has nothing.
- valkyrie meanwhile fun hero, but only viable if you light spam people to death. absolutely bad heavy attacks, which are easy to predict, no good chains for them and etc. The charge attack is also bad and extremely predictable. Only way i could make it play as a noob is to spam lights, i never get prompts to execute, well because can never land a heavy attack.
-dark prior, mean while in good place, his charge attack is garbage and is way too easy to predict and parry.
-Shogoki, this guy needs a huge nerf, he literally has all the benefits and no downsides. I hated facing this guy the most. his light attacks always end up in frame advantage, i found myself often in situations where shogoki would keep using his 3 light attacks chain and my hero would never come out of this "WHOA" moment, where the guard is up and gives me time to block one of the attacks. also this same "WHOA" moment, doesnt end fast enough to allow me to dodge out of that light attack. This is not to mention that his HUG is to strong, It restores his FULL stamina bar, also heals, and only counter which is dodge, doesnt work, because players i faced with 50 reps and etc, would hold the hug charge a bit longer, so my dodge kind of passes and they than can still successfully hug you. Also his heavy attacks are all unblockable. Basically best way for me to counter him was to run away and hope some one else on the team who is rep 50+ would come and kick his ***.
-highlander, similar problems to shogoki, light attacks with constant frame advantage and heavies that i just can figure out how to do, because parrying is just too hard for me still.
-warmonger, overall not OP, well balanced here, only thing i found being too strong is his anti gank ult. his number 1 feat is fine, people at high rep dodge out of it very fast and easy that i stopped even using it.
- kensei, i think i never blocked or parried any of his attacks, i also think that i never even successfully dodge any of his attacks. this is another hero to who i lost all my 1v1 fights.
- Shaman, same as kensei, cant dodge any thing, cant block and to hell with parry.
- conqueror, literally light spams any one to death, looks like has guaranteed frame advantage and is impossible to hit because all players just block and parry attacks so well with him.
-lawbringer, needless to say, it's a stun after stun after than until you're out of stamina and you really cant do any thing against this hero except to hit in the back like a rat while he fights some one else.
these are not all hero issues i found, just the most annoying ones.
2)The "lock on" system, feels way to clunky. It's good in 1v1 situations, but when there are 1v2+, it becomes a problem. I know there is revenge mechanic to kind of balance it out, but it doesnt do anything against the clunkiness. some thing needs to be done for this lock on system to work better in group fights.
3) Parry, i know there are a lot of godly skilled players who can parry every thing, but i think there needs to be a bigger window when you are able to parry attacks. right now, parry is useless, at least to be as average player. I parry successfully once every 10 times. meaning 10% rate. while i attempt a parry, i cant dodge, or strike. If i forget about parry and just use dodge against heavies and hopefully block for light, i can still effectively light spam counter enemies and rate of success if like 20 times higher. Of course being logical human being, i would never attempt to parry because it forces me to be idle and gives me 90% chance to eat damage, mean while if i just relentlessly attack and dodge, i will at very least exchange damage, but most likely be able to out damage the enemy. it's a win/win situation.
4) guard, i did tune it up as much as i could in setting. but playing with key board and mouse, guard has lots of problems. first problem, because we all use good laser mouse, the guard tents to jump a lot. situation where you want to block light attack from right, you move your guard there just on time, but then it jitters and moved fast from right guard to top guard,than back to right than back to top and eventually that light attack lands and deals damage. If i set settings for less sensitive guard, what happens is that my guard doesnt move on time from right guard to top guard to block a top light attack. No matter how i tuned the sensitivity and other parameters of guard, i always get one or the other. Also to mention, that same guard jitter wont let me successfully parry most of the time. because when heavy attack comes from top, i move mouse there and click to parry, the jitter often moves it to the right and instead of parry i start a heavy attack and end up eating the enemy's strike.
5) match maker and it's calculation parameters.
-matchmaker, way too often it doesnt matches you with player of your skill. at some point with my stats of 53% win rate and 160% kill/assist ration, it keeps throwing me vs players rep 50, 100, i think highest i saw was 136. meanwhile im only rep rep 14. When i face those guys, i have absolutely no chance, they block and parry all my attacks, only way i was able to land some thing is if i run from behind like a rat and strike a light attack, and even than, they manage to block most of them. Like these guys have way more skill than me, like by a ton. Being an average player who plays for FUN, i will never ever "git gud" enough to play on their level. Why am i even being matched with them?
- this leads me to Match Making parameters. The MM should take into consideration only skill, not rep or else. In this game, measuring skill, should be done by a block/parry ration, not Takedowns/assists. Blocking and Parrying takes actual skill here, good reaction, knowledge of timings, heroes, their mix ups and etc Mean while takedowns, you can rack them up by just kill stealing (hitting enemies from the back), by landing good amount of hits and etc. As for assists, i think all i need to do is run by an enemy and sneeze, some one will kill them and i get the assist. MM based on takedowns/assists is very incorrect, as nether measure your skill properly. Meanwhile Parry/block ratio, would give most precise skill measurement of the player, as they are purely based on skill, not luck, or rat style game play.
6)Game optimization.
- I noticed that very often maps take 5+ mins to load. this should not happen in this game. It's not even as close to being heavy on files like let's say TESO, which is an MMO with similar graphic, but a freaking MMO! TESO world loads faster on my PC than Maps in Dominion here.
- Than i noticed that after match when you get prompted to leave to war map, it starts giving me messages at the bottom "this guy left, that guy left" and when i leave my self, it just starts sending that message for every guy who was in game. do you really think i care? why you spam me with those messages, it's small, but also shows how unoptimized game it.
- another thing is when you left the game to the war map, after it finished. you go back into another game, however the loading screen shows you the list of players from previous game you played. when it loads to character select you see that you're with completely different group of people. This is another sign of bad optimization.
7) dailies and events.
- events, i found the game lacking events, every other similar by concept game Always has weekend events. Events like, play these weekends and get double exp for all your matches, or double gold (or whatever is the currency in the game). Here we have absolutely no weekend events of any kind.
- dailies. the 24/36 hours resets are bad, who came up with idea that dailies should reset first time in 24 hours 2nd time in 36 hours and than repeat the cycle? every where dailies reset once every 24 hours. I found dailies being extremely lackluster. i play games in big chunks of time, meaning not every day for 1-2 hours, but 1-2 days 10 hours each day and over that course of time i need things to do/grind.
This is probably not all problems but sure enough to force me out of the game. Oh yeah, the War Map, i didnt mention any thing about it, because it's completely useless and not lucrative enough to bother figuring it out,
Lastly, i want to mention i only played Dominion, few Breach matches to knock off dailies. I personally dont play 1v1 modes in any games, because they are not fun and extremely skill dependent. As average player, i will never commit so much time to play games competitively.
Every one, Devs and Nerds need to understand that games today dont survive just on Nerd/Unicorn players who play to compete and all their life evolved around 1 game. Such players exist and often are 5% of total game's population. Building game just for such players is financially inconvenient. I'm not saying build all games for dum dums like Fortnight, but definitely game should account for the bigger player population of average players.
I leave you at this. I know bunch of unicorns will roll in trashing the post with "git gud scrub" and etc. I got my worth of money out of FOR HONOR and it's time to move on, as the game stopped giving me joy and i only suffer playing with these super cyber sport players in a unbalanced game.
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