My days with Bleeding Edge
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Have played a few days of bleeding edge including betas and release, came because I have a long history with competitive/multiplayer action games and consider them to be my favourite genre.
I'll start by saying this game has huge potential but obviously has some issues that I will try to address in order of importance.
[NECESSARY]
General lag: pretty sure a week old game with cross-play on release and OCE servers isn't going to be putting me with unfavourable server's 24/7 so that means its probably not an ms issue more an net-code issue.
I love so much about this game but it really does have one of the worst on-launch latency issues I've seen for a game in a few years: Every time an enemy jumps or dashes without fail they will just disappear and you won't know which direction they went, they just disappear off your screen because they jumped or hit dash and the server can't handle telling me which direction they dodged in.
On top of that if there have been wayyy too many times where something crazy as a death reset just happens, like you'll kill someone and then they'll do the death animation and it will make the noise and then they'll just flicker back to being alive, the same has happened with me before where I have straight up died and come back to life for a second only to get hit and die for real because of the confusion.
The lag also makes chasing incredibly difficult x as an enemy running away will break out of combos even if you seem to have been close enough.Combat consistency: There should not be guesswork to the combat, it should be consistent and fair, so why does every different enemy (tank, dps, healer) somehow possess the ability to magically avoid being knocked down sometimes? Seriously some players just do not get staggered when they should giving them free room to escape for no reason despite landing multiple melee combos on them.
On top of that, the ones who are already ignoring staggers (tanks) need to have all of that cleaving power reduced in some way, their damage is fine but they should not be able to just bully two other players by virtue of having uninterruptible melees, they should have their resistance to being staggered tied only to a cooldown ability so that other characters may fight them without ganging up.
PARRYING should also give some kind of other benefit, half a stamina bar is not good enough for how rarely you can use it. Landing a parry should allow you to immediately follow up with a combo that the parried enemy cannot escape from without using an evade and it should restore an entire stamina bar to ranged characters so they have a reason to use it at all. This also makes escaping rarely possible for certain characters like Gizmo if they can land their parries well.The ranged issue: I really do think its this simple, people have an issue with ranged auto-aim, so simple make a 'marking area' taking up like 50% of the middle of the whole screen where you can only basic attack as a ranged to someone you have slightly centred on your display, this can trick both the camera and player in tricky situations where you're low and slowly melting to death from an unavoidable death turret and dash to break LOS, this will also make ranged characters more skill expressive and give them an excuse to to some cool things they normally couldn't to compensate.
[IMPORTANT (but not necessary]A
More mods: 3 ain't enough, having 4 or five would passive increase TTK for each character in a specific way and allow more varied builds, I think this is a two-birds-one-stone implementation as you'd feel like you can do a little more as an individual player and can create fun, single-ability-heavy builds for replayablity's sake. If you find that it makes certain aspects of a character too OP you can micro-tune the numbers or better yet disable more than 2/3 mods of the same color/type to avoid the stacking being the problematic part. Also a new ultimate for each character would be fairly easily, give the game some lasting power and be an excuse to make more mods for a character.
Individual expression: I fully understanding wanting to lean this game to a more team-oriented style of targeting/grouping/coordinating etc, but you're not winning any prizes by focusing so hard on the concept while ignoring how some character are put-off / punished by this style of play. Healers are abused and I can't imagine why you'd want to play with it being the most important/focused role in the game, you're completely and 100% reliant on your team and not the other way around. If healers healed less and did more damage you could have the best of both worlds, the team fight is equally as skill oriented as before and you have more freedom in target selection both as a healer and when targeting one. To compensate you could give one or more healer's a passive that increases their healing when they pickup attack boosts ooooor increases the heals they do the more teammates are around them: this incentivizes grouping and reduce's the power of a healer who is out of position/hasn't been healing their team well enough.
[WOULD BE NICE]
Balanced 1v1s: as of now you can't usually call 1v1s balanced despite the parry system in place, I think for the sake of pure enjoyment and welcome depth there could be a multitude of changes made so that the two people 1v1ing to the side feel like they could have each done something. I think the parry changes I suggested earlier fit here perfectly on top of having more mod's so that they can do more with each aspect of their kit to turn the fight. Your very first or first two basic attacks to an enemy should be low but they should come out as quickly as possible so you can use the game's mobility system in unison with the stagger system to secure the opener of a combo and force evasions more consistently, it would also be worth having more mods to reduce healing in general as I've found very few for how impactful a decent healer can be on their own by kiting and never dying.
Critical Parry: A critical parry would be a player's option to counter being jumped on by multiple enemies that isn't just spamming movement abilities and hoping to run into your healer. A critical parry would trigger when you manage land a parry while in melee distance of 1 or more other champs, it will essentially give every enemy the 'parried' animation but for slightly longer and will refill the stamina bar based on how many you hit.
Nuke / Train: On some maps the train literally comes out of nowhere with no warning and likewise the nukes can completely destroy the comeback of a losing team on power cell modes. The nukes should deal a bit less damage on their own and the train should honk before it enters the map (is it is effectively invisible until it crosses the gate.
I know this is a long one but I sincerely hope there's just one dev writing even 1 or two of these things down for future consideration, I love games like this and I will do anything to make sure it doesn't die and make sure it at least sets a good example for the future of the genre or god-forbid it get polished to the moon and back and becomes a solid competitive game of its own
