Balancing Suggestions for Makutu/Zerocool
-
So I've spent a lot of time thinking about this and since it hasn't happened yet I figured I may say what's on my mind.
Makutu
He's too slow, and his abilities don't synergize particularly well.- Improve Pepeke Stance and Leg-It. The speed boost it gives allies is fine, but he's ungodly slow. He already has basically no dodge or dash, and even Barge is slow moving. And since all of his abilities are melee ranged, make him really fast to compensate. That's really not that complicated, he needs to be faster.
- Cleanse is too weak as a mechanic. Allow him to use it while he's stunned, and have it work more reliably against things like Oil Slick and Ride of the Lightning. If I've cleansed it once, the same ability shouldn't reapply the effect. If I'm in Ora stance when I get stunned then oh well it's my fault for not having Leg-It ready, but playing around Cleanse to compensate for his lack of evades its a great strategy that we can't use at all right now because Cleanse is a near worthless mechanic.
- Pepeke should improve the speed of Barge and/or Katamaori. Give me a reason to use it, make it faster. I'd also prefer if things like Barge or Surge aren't slowed by the slow status, it really puts them in a class below dashes, but that may just be my opinion.
- A lot of people don't like repellent, but personally I love it. It's just a little annoying to use right now. How about this, what if I could use it during Barge? See players are getting good at timing the cancel of their Barge really well to land enemies in hazards, but if you want to make it synergize with his kit, all him to use this abilities like Cleanse/Leg-It and Repellent without interrupting his attacks, Barge, or Katamaori.
- Another way to improve Repellent is to include a small AOE pull. Make his 3rd ability like his 2nd, where in ora stance it's Repellent but in pepeke stance it's an attraction special instead. This could lead to some really amazing Barge combos where you pull someone into your Barge.
- Ultimately, if you want to make Repellent good without any of the larger changes from the first 2 suggestions, the easiest method is to just make is a disruption type CC effect. This tiny push don't really stop the enemy from doing anything, just displaces them a little. This makes what is suppose to be a support/peel tank rather shitty at his job. Make it a CC that cancels Siphon Life and such, like Sucka. This is one of the most important suggestions I can give really.
- Katamaori has this glitch right now where you can double jump right when it's activated and it usually cause the animation for it to fail. Frankly, fix the bug but keep the double jump. Please, it's just a cool effect that can be really useful at times.
tl;dr -> The most important things to do are to make Makutu faster, improve Cleanse to work while CC'd, and improve Repellent into an actual CC.
Zerocool
Zerocool is a little OP in healing, otherwise I really like him, but Recharge is such an awkwardly designed special. It doesn't behave like any other special in the game, and it has no cooldown. The blue orb that represents your heal juice is also super weird, where's your editor because there's so many ability description pages for characters I want to completely redo from the ground up as they don't accurately reflect what the character has and ends up describing obvious things instead of the things we actually need to know.Anyway... options for fixing Recharge, pick one.
- Make it a normal special. Something like a 5s healing channel that can switch targets and has really high burst heal but can be cancelled by CC, much like Life Force, but then it goes on a 10s cooldown. You won't do this one but you should understand why it's much easier to understand and fits the paradigm of your system better.
- Remove this trickle heal, treat the blue orb like stamina. If it's out, it's done and needs to recharge before it can be used again. This annoying never ending heal isn't helping.
- Remove the blue orb altogether, streamline the healing so there is no burst then fall off, just make it a little better than his trickle heal and it would effectively behave like a mercy heal.
- Have it so if he gets interrupted by a melee attack or other effect, he can't use Recharge again for like 5s. A zerocool that can run and heal, only having to briefly stop because it NEVER has a cooldown and can't be countered easily because he has excellent escape potential... anything to allow better counterplay.
Right now the biggest problem I see with him is you either attack him or you lose. If you have a really good team, with a Miko and high damage, you could place a Kinetic Shield and try it that way, but you're unlikely to kill a give that fast unless you went full in on a pick comp. I'm not going to say it's impossible to kill anyone while their zerocool is still alive, but it severely limits your gameplay options.
Anyway that was a bit of a stream of consciousness rant but I've been wanting to write down these ideas for a while. Ninja Theory is pretty creative so I'm sure they could even come up with something better.
-
@Evade-This5965 For the longest time, I've been playing with Makutu thinking I'm doing something wrong with him and that's why I'm so unsuccessful with him..but everything you said about him is right. He's too slow for a game where he has to deal with people who can easily dodge and run very very...VERY......VERY fast (Miku, Daemon, Gizmo SIGH) and cleanse and repellent should be better. I can imagine his abilities are dismal because they made him a jack of all trades tank. He could have ended up being a Galilea from battleborn or Briggete (however you spell it) from Overwatch, where he's just amazing at everything and can't die, while healing and buffing his allies. Yet he ended up being dismal with the many things he can do.
-
There's a lot of interesting information here, thanks for posting.
I know the team are always looking at ways to improve fighters, we recently made changes to Buttercup and Maeve.
Perhaps Makutu deserves a look soon...
