The Thread Where DNC and Ice Dragon Argues All Day

[DehNutCase]

Edit: Quick Summary of Things so far:

8 hours ago, Ice Dragon said:

Quick summary of points before I go do other things I need to do before sleeping:

• Armors have below average support requirements to function because their higher raw stats allow them to forgo buffs and still have an advantage in raw stats. It then goes without saying that giving them the same amount of support just lets them keep that stat gap.
• Armors provide below average support to allies if run when alone on a mixed team, average support to allies when on a 2 pairs team, and above average support to allies when on a full armor team.
• Armors trade tactical advantage for combat performance advantage. The better a unit can handle combat, the less they need to move, and I'll argue that the value they gain from their combat performance is worth every cent of their lost mobility and more, especially when the mobility can be easily fixed at a very small cost.
• In terms of mobility, infantry is below average and all three other movement types are above average.
• All buffs that aren't single-stat Hone, Fortify, and Drive buffs are team-composition-dependent. If full Tactic buffs are to be considered to be the default buff configuration for non-armors, there is no reason to not allow armors to run triple Tactic plus Armor March or double Ward Armor plus Armor March and a Drive or two.
• Dancers are overrated. In particular, enemy-phase-heavy teams have zero use for them. They're good, but overrated.
• Enemy-phase units are easier to use, but harder to build, due to most of their skills being rare and/or locked to 5-star promotions or 5-star-exclusive characters.
• DehNutCase likes to ramble about unrelated things a lot, which adds to the word count. I like to yell.
• DehNutCase doesn't know how to use armors properly and has never fought heavily merged armors to the best of my knowledge, and I would highly advise he do so at some point.

 

17 hours ago, DehNutCase said:

I rate melee armors extremely low because, while they're really good at the one thing they do, they only do that one thing. (Rein as the extreme opposite, for example, has 3 move, meaning even if you removed his weapon slot he's still quite useful at ferrying people around with reposition and providing C-slot & S-slot buffs.)

Note: I do face the occasional heavily merged armor in arena---the armor teams I face have an eclectic collection of merge levels, but I do see +9 and +10s occasionally, although, obviously, not all of them would be +9 on the same team, seeing how my merges are usually in the +1 +2 range. (They do nothing because taking 1 extra turn to die to Bow Lyn or Rein doesn't change the reason my team demolishes low mobility teams---vs. low mobility teams my team bunches up to get full access to their more difficult to use buffs: Hagoita, Ally Support, occasional Spurs or Drives, etc.; and get all the time in the world to kill them. My Arena Binge had Bow Lyn, Cordelia, and Rein all running level 1 A-slots, and I ran into like +7 armors on the high end pretty consistently---they did nothing.)

And, not having the resources Ice Dragon has (my unit roster is wide rather than deep---I have tons of units, but very few of them are merged up), I don't expect to get a lot of experience with armors and vs. 'optimized' armors any time soon.* (If he played on an emulator like I did we could work out something stupid like he builds a team for me and I run it, using Discord or something to screenshare, but that's beyond asinine.)

*Facing optimized armors probably just means I swap Brave Bow to Firesweep, honestly. Once my points get high enough that horse emblem stops being threatening---the most mobile horses also score the least---I can afford to tank Firesweep's weakness to high mobility teams and leverage it's effectiveness vs. low mobility teams. This is pretty much why I score people like Bow Lyn and Rein very highly---it's trivial for them to optimize versus certain threats.

End of Edit.

 

Moving our stuff here since people are complaining about my walls of text. (There's some issues with trying to edit or post ultra-long posts, particularly one with multiple spoiler tags or quotes in it, so it's probably simpler to have a separate thread when we start these kind of things.)

On 7/18/2018 at 4:29 PM, Ice Dragon said:

You're blatantly ignoring the situation where Reinhardt is at the front of your formation because you actually do want to hit something 5 squares away from your front line. No one else will be able to reach him to Reposition him back unless they also have 3 movement range.

That's... exceedingly rare, and usually not dealt with by having Reinhardt in front. If the enemy team can be that spread out and still cover each other they're probably ultra-mobile themselves. Reinhardt isn't actually the best choice* vs. ultra-mobile teams---it's people like Cordelia and Brave Roy and, yes, Zelgius and Nowi and whatnot that do the most work vs. mobile-teams, since you can either hit and run easier using Galeforce as an escape mechanism, or you have easier one-turn sweeps, or you have a way to pick them off one at a time in controlled situations.

*He's still a good choice, mind.

On 7/18/2018 at 4:29 PM, Ice Dragon said:

What you're saying is that, strictly speaking, when you don't have another cavalry unit on your team to match its movement range, you've sacrificed the strategic mobility you could have gained by using another cavalry unit instead.

In other words, a lone cavalry unit only gives you tactical mobility and no strategic mobility, but a pair of cavalry units gives you both tactical mobility and strategic mobility.

This is another case of the parts adding up to less than the whole.

A single cav unit is actually still strategic mobility. You just can't pair him off---that is, if you're trying to divide and conquer it's going to a 3/1 split, with the expectation that the cav will run back to recombine with the main team before combat.

Alternatively, if combat effectiveness has to be kept, the horse will sacrifice his raw mobility for his buffing and mobility-assist capabilities and go with a slower partner. And just because a horse + flier or horse + infantry pair is less mobile than horse + horse doesn't mean it's not more mobile or comparable to  armor + infantry, armor + flier, armor + horse, or armor + armor.

On 7/18/2018 at 4:29 PM, Ice Dragon said:

And yet this whole response makes zero mention of the positioning requirements that was the main point of the quote you were responding to.

But Tactics are easier on positioning requirements than Hone Type?

I honestly don't understand what you're talking about. Wave has positioning issues, but Tactics is a team-building constraint, not a positioning one.

In terms of positioning leniency it goes something like Tactics > Generic Hone/Fort > Hone/Fort Type > Generic Drives > Goad/Ward Type > Spur > Ally Assist. Wave would be around Generic Hone Fort but also has a turn count requirement---which, since controlling turn count usually is a matter of mobility and positioning, really means that it's probably one of the worst in terms of positioning requirements.

On 7/18/2018 at 4:29 PM, Ice Dragon said:

I know exactly what you mean by dancers giving +2 free movement to the team. You just wasted ten paragraphs not addressing the issue and ranting about something else that we both already understand.

You have completely ignored the point, which is that a permanent +1 movement to a single unit is not comparable to +2 movement you can hand out to one unit every turn.

Sorry about the digression on dancers. I just think of it as the exact same as running a horse because, just like having a horse, you won't use the mobility all the time. It's just there if needed. Like, just because I can move 3 move on a horse every single turn doesn't mean there aren't times the horse would just move 2 squares, 1 square, or even stand still. Same for dancers.

Unless you meant that dancers are better than horses in terms of adding mobility to the team. That's something I agree with. (Which is why I don't particularly like pure Horse Emblem, since they have no dancers.)

On 7/18/2018 at 4:29 PM, Ice Dragon said:

No, seriously, are you even reading what you're responding to?

Oh I might've misunderstood you, actually. You meant that you have 7 skill-slots for buffs by running armor march + 1 armor with a c-slot free.

Ignoring the fact that you won't be able to split the team 3 and 1 like you could with a single horse (an infantry or flier would probably get ran down as the 1) for Divide and Conquer purposes... it's basically a giant positioning and skill-slot problem and number of buff receivers problem.

 

Armors, if they're trying to buff the team, would probably prefer Tactics buffs for their lower positioning requirements---but this forbids 3 armors unless it's some kind of janky 3 protect 1 build where 3 armors are protecting 1... other thing. They'll have definite problems using Waves (low mobility means bad at turn count control), and Goads and Drives are finicky unless your team is defensively inclined. Generic Hones and Forts might be fine depending on how mobile the rest of your team is. Being melee and 2 move at best*, armors would prefer to be in the front of the formation, so for an offense team their teammates needs to be fine with being in the back of the formation most of the time. A defensive team won't have this issue, of course.

*I rate ranged armors highly, so I'm assuming you have no issues with me only talking about melee armors.

I thought you meant that armors can get away with less buff slots and buffing ability because they can afford to dump more stats. But you actually meant that they only sacrifice one buff slot.

 

My problem is that their C-slot and S-slots are the hardest to use when buffing other people. Like, if, say, Bow Lyn was running Atk Tactic and for some reason I either didn't bring Flying Azura or she was needed in another part of the map, Bow Lyn can pretty reliably get into position to buff Cordelia and do what she needs to do during the player phase, using her good reach to either enter combat or use her reposition. Ignoring the fact that armors are pretty unreliable with reposition (although I'd probably run Bow Jakob with repo and armored boots), armors have a harder time both getting into the right squares and to do something afterwards.

The main reason I rate flier and horse support ability highly isn't just because of their access to Type Buffs. Infantry has the second worst C-slot, for me, because of the fact that they aren't mobile enough to reliably buff and do their own jobs at the same time. (Infantry do have some infantry only buffs---they're weaker than Type Buffs, in my opinion, but they do have them.)

On 7/18/2018 at 4:29 PM, Ice Dragon said:

No, the reason further armors on a team that already has an armor pair has a lower barrier to entry is because you already have Armor March or two stacks of Ward Armor on the team. A single Armor March user can typically sustain 2 other armors by itself.

Have you actually played with a fully built armor team before?

If I played with a fully built armor team, it would be one with ranged armors. Which I already rate highly. (My armor teams aren't all ranged armors---building 3 or even 2 tome or bow armors to the level enemy phase Zelgius and Hector and Zephiel and Effie* and the like has is pretty expensive, but that's an expense issue and not a scoring issue.)

*I personally consider a DC Effie, Zephiel, or whatever set and a DC Hector set around the same price. Armads is good but it's not what makes or breaks Hector's sets, and there's no reason to consider Hector cheaper just because he starts with DC---foddering him to a 3* Effie or Zephiel is just 22k extra feathers compared to building him up.

So no, I haven't played with fully built melee armor team before.

 

Regarding the armor march thing. This is just our viewpoint differences---I prefer flexibility, and I gladly pay a bit of raw power for it, meaning I rate units that are flexible very highly, usually higher than the specialists who outdo them in that particular specialty. You don't mind if units only do one thing if they do it very well, and you rate them as well or better than the flexible units who are almost as good in that role. Armor march makes the team's movement very inflexible, because, if you only use 1 C-slot for it, then basically all the armors on the team are glued to that one armor.

On 7/18/2018 at 4:29 PM, Ice Dragon said:

Obviously.

I think you're overestimating Reinhardt's abilities, though. Reinhardt needs a ton of support just to equal Hardin's enemy phase performance. Reinhardt running a Blarblade Close Counter build with +6/6/0/0 is comparable to Hardin's standard mixed-phase build with no support at all and has a notably worse player phase than Hardin if you exclude Hardin's lower reach.

Reinhardt's combat performance with +6/6/6/6 on both phases is actually comparable to Hardin's combat performance with +0/0/8/8 trading more mobility for the requirement of more specialized support.

 

If you had actually read the earlier points, you'd also know that I don't find +6/6/6/6 particularly reliable.

The +6 all stats being unreliable thing is probably due to how we rate units. The units I rate highly are all very good at providing buffs. Tana & Flying Azura have flying mobility---more squares to be in to provide buffs---Brave Roy and Brave Lyn and Reinhardt all have horse mobility---more squares they can reach to apply buffs, and higher threat range meaning they can be further from the fight and still contribute. W!Tharja is a glaring exception, but she's pretty much the one unit I consider strong enough in terms of raw combat that her absurdness in her specialty actually counteracts how specialized she is.

A high scoring team by my standards naturally has extremely reliable buffing abilities, because buffing ability is something I give points for.

 

Like, 6/6/5/6 is pretty reliable for Rein in combined arms. That lazy ass Cordelia/Azura/Rein/Lyn team only needs Azura to run S-slot Res Tactic over the current Fort Res. I can even nab 6/6/6/6 if I swapped Lyn's hp + 3 seal for Def Tactic. (I didn't bother to optimize that team at all past unit selection.)

 

This honestly feels like a play style thing.

On 7/18/2018 at 4:29 PM, Ice Dragon said:

If you read tiering discussions for Pokémon, you'd know that that's exactly why Pokémon with multiple sets have higher tiering than their individual best sets.

Yeah, but in our case, units with multiple sets, or a set that does multiple things, will either help during team building---if you had a +10 Rein and everyone else is like, +2 or whatever, you're not going to want to swap him out, so the fact that he can do a lot of jobs means that he makes building the team around him a lot easier---or else during the match itself, CC Rein, for example, can either do his classic 'run up and kill someone' thing on player phase, or he can do the defensive 'controlled counter-kill' thing like Nowi or Zelgius or whatever.

 

Mind, it's not like I don't see why you might rate Zelgius and Hardin near Reinhardt's level---for the teams that need Zelgius' specialty, and only that, Zelgius matches or eclipses Rein. I just don't rate units that way.

On 7/18/2018 at 4:29 PM, Ice Dragon said:

The thing about playing a predominantly enemy-phase team is that your back line is actually out of reach for two reasons.

First, because you play reactively, you can usually make sure that your front line is always at the very edge of the opponent's reach. Failing that, you have the second reason, which is that Wards have 2 range, meaning you can deploy the armored flower formation (a diamond) where the squares needed to reach the back line are occupied by the front line.

The beauty of Swap is that the armored flower can use the center square as a switch table, rearranging itself from any configuration into any other configuration within the space of a single turn.

Fair.

On 7/18/2018 at 4:29 PM, Ice Dragon said:

Not really. Your unit's attack range doesn't change whether or not you can be Repositioned out of a specific square. It just changes the position the opponent needs to be at in order to need to attack from that square.

Given that the opponent is in the same square, though, you have different squares you can attack from. I like the fact that Cordelia is melee for a lot of reasons, but the fact that Rein is ranged means those two as a pair give you a lot of choices in how to kill people and get out.

I'll agree that some squares are annoying as hell, but mobility + range gives you more square options.

On 7/18/2018 at 4:29 PM, Ice Dragon said:

Yes, that's the map.

You can't really build a team on the fly for the map in the normal Arena, though.

And I don't---the most mobile team by my standards will naturally include 2 fliers basically all the time. Flying Azura or Ninian is just too damn good to pass up.* We haven't seen any flying mages yet, but I would've rated them higher than everyone else. Spring Camilla is a 10/10 like I've said before, but even Flying Nino would be 9/10.

*Bow Weakness is just too small of a price to pay for a strong C-slot and better mobility compared to infantry dancers.

On 7/18/2018 at 4:29 PM, Ice Dragon said:

It takes 3 or 4 turns to gain 20 HP from Renewal. That's a massive number of turns unless you're against an armored team without mobility buffs.

My teams are ridiculously mobile---this is why I don't mind Renewal. You have to be 4 melee horses to start giving me trouble in terms of turn control---I can still outrun melee horses, but the thing about high mobility teams is that they're made of paper, so I usually whittle them down a bit before starting the run around.

It's obviously worse if you don't prioritize mobility as much as I do, though. Wave skills suffer the same problem.

On 7/18/2018 at 4:29 PM, Ice Dragon said:

My experience of a death ball is shaped by the death ball meta of the early days of StarCraft 2.

The death balls of the time were such that splitting your death ball was generally not advised because that compromises the advantage you have in being in a death ball: any enemy that enters the range of one unit in your ball is also in the range of everything in your ball.

The armor death ball works on the same principle, except that because combat is always one-on-one, the "everything in your ball" that can also hit the target is replaced by the number of buffs you can acquire from everything else in your ball.

In this way, the armor death ball that you call an "entrenched position" is closer to my experience of a death ball than your death ball that splits and re-forms. What your "death ball" is doing is not behaving as a death ball. You're performing one or two surgical attacks to thin out the death ball or snipe key units before closing in for attack.

Ah, fair. My deathball is more DotA based. Where you grab 5 heroes and barrel down a lane, taking all towers and the raxes in the lane.

The key about those 5 man deathballs is that, not only are they hard to fight into (like your armor deathball), they also tend to have great initiation to pick off anyone standing out of position and explode them instantly. If the enemy team tries to counter-initiate then the rest of the team follows and starts a 5v4 (since one guy was instantly exploded to start).

Edited July 20, 2018 by DehNutCase

[Rezzy]

I'm at work and don't have time to fully read, but I enjoy reading your little debates.

Also, did you take a break from Heroes for a bit?  I hadn't seen you post for a while?

[DehNutCase]

6 minutes ago, Rezzy said:

I'm at work and don't have time to fully read, but I enjoy reading your little debates.

Also, did you take a break from Heroes for a bit?  I hadn't seen you post for a while?

Real life happened. (Still happening, in fact.)

 

I just have less free time---and, believe me, arguing with Ice Dragon takes a lot of time.

[Ice Dragon]

Yeah, it usually takes about an hour or two during breaks at work to write up these responses. Unfortunately, I have fires to put out at work today (deadlines are near, and there are still bugs that need to be fixed), so I probably won't be able to get to responding to this until tomorrow.

(Also, I have plans for tonight and tomorrow night, so those are also out.)

But yeah, I'll definitely get around to responding, though, assuming I think you're wrong enough.

[XRay]

Sweet. I like reading about this stuff too.

Thought this was about Democrats and politics for a split second when I read the title.

As a suggestion, would @DehNutCase mind summarizing the main points/arguments of both sides in the OP? It is not necessary, but it would give readers a quick overview without having to read everything.

@Ice Dragon, I am also wondering if it would be good idea to move this to the analysis section? While this discussion does not deal with specific individual Heroes, it does discuss team composition, buffs, tactics, etc. that I think would be very helpful to new players.

[DehNutCase]

2 hours ago, XRay said:

As a suggestion, would @DehNutCase mind summarizing the main points/arguments of both sides in the OP? It is not necessary, but it would give readers a quick overview without having to read everything.

Quick summary is basically:

I rate melee armors extremely low because, while they're really good at the one thing they do, they only do that one thing. (Rein as the extreme opposite, for example, has 3 move, meaning even if you removed his weapon slot he's still quite useful at ferrying people around with reposition and providing C-slot & S-slot buffs.)

 

Ice, on the other hand, thinks that the fact that they can win without needing anything other than the one thing they do means that they should be rated... I don't know, just higher than I rate them. (He also thinks that they don't lose nearly as much support ability as I think they do, on account of Armor March existing.)

 

 

Regarding adding a summary to the OP... I'm not sure that would help, to be honest. 'Technically' our argument is just what I summarized about, but we spent probably over 10k words on this already, going all over the place. If you get Ice to write a quick summary as well (I don't want to assume his position for him, we misunderstand each other sometimes), I can add both what I just wrote and what he wrote to the OP.

Edited July 19, 2018 by DehNutCase

[XRay]

2 hours ago, DehNutCase said:

If you get Ice to write a quick summary as well (I don't want to assume his position for him, we misunderstand each other sometimes), I can add both what I just wrote and what he wrote to the OP.

That would be indeed helpful. That way, readers can just scroll down for more info.

[redlight]

*grabs popcorn*

Way better than KCI vs Logan Paul

[Ice Dragon]

Quick summary of points before I go do other things I need to do before sleeping:

• Armors have below average support requirements to function because their higher raw stats allow them to forgo buffs and still have an advantage in raw stats. It then goes without saying that giving them the same amount of support just lets them keep that stat gap.
• Armors provide below average support to allies if run when alone on a mixed team, average support to allies when on a 2 pairs team, and above average support to allies when on a full armor team.
• Armors trade tactical advantage for combat performance advantage. The better a unit can handle combat, the less they need to move, and I'll argue that the value they gain from their combat performance is worth every cent of their lost mobility and more, especially when the mobility can be easily fixed at a very small cost.
• In terms of mobility, infantry is below average and all three other movement types are above average.
• All buffs that aren't single-stat Hone, Fortify, and Drive buffs are team-composition-dependent. If full Tactic buffs are to be considered to be the default buff configuration for non-armors, there is no reason to not allow armors to run triple Tactic plus Armor March or double Ward Armor plus Armor March and a Drive or two.
• Dancers are overrated. In particular, enemy-phase-heavy teams have zero use for them. They're good, but overrated.
• Enemy-phase units are easier to use, but harder to build, due to most of their skills being rare and/or locked to 5-star promotions or 5-star-exclusive characters.
• DehNutCase likes to ramble about unrelated things a lot, which adds to the word count. I like to yell.
• DehNutCase doesn't know how to use armors properly and has never fought heavily merged armors to the best of my knowledge, and I would highly advise he do so at some point.

[DehNutCase]

Oh and here's the pictures I took from my arena binge, I'm not sure if you read my post on that or not:

 

My damage dealers were running level 1 A-slots, which should more than compensate for the fact that the merges on the enemy armors are uneven---I saw +0s, sure, but I also saw +8s, +9s, etc. (DB 3 vs. 1 is 4 Atk, and Rein still had an Atk left to gain from his merges, L&D 3 vs. 1 is 2 Atk, 2 Spd.)

 

Edit: I don't really expect ward armor to change anything, seeing how I just AI manipulate the armors to split up and come in one by one. I didn't show it for that 4x vengeful\bold fighter & ward armor team, but they pretty much never had full buffs when I killed them one by one, because my team was too mobile compared to them.

Edited July 20, 2018 by DehNutCase

[XRay]

10 hours ago, Ice Dragon said:

Enemy-phase units are easier to use,

I think that is dependent on the player.

I have been playing with my Ward Armor team (Zephiel+5, Effie+4, Sheena+5, BB!Lyn+10; BB!Lyn is there for healing and dual Drives, so she is like 3/4 Ward Armor) every week for Arena Assault for like maybe half a year a now, and it definitely is not easy. Outside of Aethers, they are all running skills for performance instead of scoring, and I still lose a lot.

10 hours ago, Ice Dragon said:

DehNutCase doesn't know how to use armors properly

I do not either, and I want to know the secret. I see shit like Armor effective Weapons and Firesweep archers like almost every other round, and I am usually fucked if the enemies are flying or have Dancers/Singers on top of that.

Oh, and drag backs are the worst. I do not see them often thankfully, but I remember facing it once and it dragged my armor out and got slaughtered.

Edited July 20, 2018 by XRay

[DehNutCase]

1 hour ago, XRay said:

I think that is dependent on the player.

I actually agree with Ice in this respect---you need a better understanding of AI Manipulation for mobile teams to reach the level of defensive teams in terms of reliability.

I leverage the fact that enemy teams never get their buffs off versus me because of my better mobility & decent AI Manipulation a lot versus dragons and armors---and it takes a fair amount of games & looking up how AI functions in the wiki to learn AI Manipulation to a good enough level. (I work on it a lot, and even now I'm still not satisfied with how good I am---I still can't perfectly predict how AI acts in a map with breakable tiles.) 

 

For defensive units pretty much all you need to know is: If they're in a unit's threat range, that unit will suicide themselves in unless they have a rally in the assist slot.

Edited July 20, 2018 by DehNutCase

[XRay]

50 minutes ago, DehNutCase said:

you need a better understanding of AI Manipulation for mobile teams to reach the level of defensive teams in terms of reliability.

Do you mean the opposite? AI manipulation is pretty simple for a more mobile Player Phase team; you just need to split your team a bit and let the enemy break itself apart going around obstacles.

For a Ward Armor team, you need to stick together most of the time for the buffs and splitting apart is not really an option unless you run Armor March or Armor Boots. Running either means you are running less buffs or combat skills.

Unlike a Ward Dragon team, picking a battle is quite a bit harder when the enemies are rushing at you all at once since armors do not have enough mobility to back out quickly.

[DehNutCase]

9 minutes ago, XRay said:

Do you mean the opposite? AI manipulation is pretty simple for a more mobile Player Phase team; you just need to split your team a bit and let the enemy break itself apart going around obstacles.

For a Ward Armor team, you need to stick together most of the time for the buffs and splitting apart is not really an option unless you run Armor March or Armor Boots. Running either means you are running less buffs or combat skills.

Unlike a Ward Dragon team, picking a battle is quite a bit harder when the enemies are rushing at you all at once since armors do not have enough mobility to back out quickly.

The thing is, I consider the whole 'just split you team' thing harder than 'just plant one guy in a certain square.' It's also not obvious in what order or how the enemy team is going to split until you have a lot of experience with a given team (you can just math it out, of course, but that's... a lot of effort). Open maps gives you no trouble since you have all the time in the world to AI manipulate, but some maps put you on a timer, which is when how good you are at AI manipulation is tested.

The reason defensive teams are so reliable in this respect is that they're built to always ORKO when they're fighting the correct matchup (this means they won't be running Aether), meaning all you need is the ability to sit yourselves in the right squares, which is easy enough even for 1 move armors, since most arena maps don't have the enemy reaching you until the second enemy phase.

 

The way Ice thinks of it is that: Since the team wins without needing to split up, they should be rated just as highly as teams that could split up and then divide and conquer, even if that other team could also win without splitting up.

I ding melee armors for this, he doesn't, and this is more or less what we've been arguing over, I think.

[Ice Dragon]

13 minutes ago, XRay said:

Do you mean the opposite? AI manipulation is pretty simple for a more mobile Player Phase team; you just need to split your team a bit and let the enemy break itself apart going around obstacles.

For a Ward Armor team, you need to stick together most of the time for the buffs and splitting apart is not really an option unless you run Armor March or Armor Boots. Running either means you are running less buffs or combat skills.

Unlike a Ward Dragon team, picking a battle is quite a bit harder when the enemies are rushing at you all at once since armors do not have enough mobility to back out quickly.

Dealing with the AI for enemy-phase play is absurdly easy. If the opponent has exactly one unit that can attack you, that one unit will attack unless its path is blocked by someone Rallying it or if it's a dancer and someone just Rallied it and is now eligible to be danced.

Also note that when I say "enemy-phase units", I mean all enemy-phase units, not just armors. Eldigan and Xander fall in that bucket just as much as Hector and Effie do, and Xander is probably one of the easiest units to use in the game.

 

1 minute ago, DehNutCase said:

The way Ice thinks of it is that: Since the team wins without needing to split up, they should be rated just as highly as teams that could split up and then divide and conquer, even if that other team could also win without splitting up.

I ding melee armors for this, he doesn't, and this is more or less what we've been arguing over, I think.

That's probably the most succinct summary I've seen of this argument. And yes, that's pretty much the heart of our most recent argument.

[XRay]

41 minutes ago, Ice Dragon said:

Also note that when I say "enemy-phase units", I mean all enemy-phase units, not just armors. Eldigan and Xander fall in that bucket just as much as Hector and Effie do, and Xander is probably one of the easiest units to use in the game.

I am fine with other Enemy Phase units, what I am not fine with is Enemy Phase armor units, since my main issue with them is that they are not fast enough to get out of the way once the enemies start rushing you. The first enemy unit usually is not the problem, the problem is the reinforcing teammates that are now charging at you with armor effective Weapons and Firesweep Weapons, and my armor team cannot back out quickly enough so that only the right armor is in enemy range. Maybe I just need to pull a second Amelia and the problem will go away.

It is not really huge deal I guess since it is so easy to just spam surrender and restart, but it is super annoying when I think I can win but still lose miserably, and that is what I really hate.

49 minutes ago, DehNutCase said:

The thing is, I consider the whole 'just split you team' thing harder than 'just plant one guy in a certain square.'

For a new player, yeah, stuff like Ike and Nowi are easy to use when they can get unplanted and move out the way.

But if you using armor units, they can still Swap, but that does not really get them out the way depending on the terrain and the mobility of the enemy. To make matters worse I see like a Firesweep BH!Lyn or an armor effective Weapon like every other round.

Player Phase teams only need one Firesweep nuke and a Dancer/Singer, and once you master the Dance/Sing-Reposition combo it is not really that hard to beat any Arena team.

I think I am just ranting about not having a spare Armor March at this point, so I think I will just resume spectating.

[DehNutCase]

11 minutes ago, XRay said:

For a new player, yeah, stuff like Ike and Nowi are easy to use when they can get unplanted and move out the way.

But if you using armor units, they can still Swap, but that does not really get them out the way depending on the terrain and the mobility of the enemy. To make matters worse I see like a Firesweep BH!Lyn or an armor effective Weapon like every other round.

Player Phase teams only need one Firesweep nuke and a Dancer/Singer, and once you master the Dance/Sing-Reposition combo it is not really that hard to beat any Arena team.

You're pretty much right, to be honest. The main thing is that you're considering it from a 'good enough' perspective, whereas I'm not really satisfied with my team until I have a 100% win rate. This means my teams need to be able to deal with every single type of team that can possibly be tossed at them---and firesweep has a weakness to high-mobility teams---meaning I need to win combats without dazzle staves or firesweep.

A team like you've said would get 5 wins in a row without issue, probably dropping one or two games at most. A team I consider 'good' wouldn't drop a single game, played competently, ever. Map doesn't matter, enemy lineup doesn't matter, they'll just straight up crush every possible arena defense team in every possible arena defense map. An offense team needs a really high level of AI understanding to do this at that level of reliability---the 'everyone stuck behind breakable walls' map, for example, is hard to maneuver in, but also threatens combat the first enemy phase.

[Ice Dragon]

25 minutes ago, XRay said:

I am fine with other Enemy Phase units, what I am not fine with is Enemy Phase armor units, since my main issue with them is that they are not fast enough to get out of the way once the enemies start rushing you. The first enemy unit usually is not the problem, the problem is the reinforcing teammates that are now charging at you with armor effective Weapons and Firesweep Weapons, and my armor team cannot back out quickly enough so that only the right armor is in enemy range. Maybe I just need to pull a second Amelia and the problem will go away.

It is not really huge deal I guess since it is so easy to just spam surrender and restart, but it is super annoying when I think I can win but still lose miserably, and that is what I really hate.

My Arena Assault lead team has only two mobility skills across the entire team, Myrrh's Guidance and Zelgius's Warp Powder (not even Swap because I use Rally Def/Res for points). As you can probably guess, Guidance is absolutely crucial to making the team work as otherwise my team would fail to move quickly enough without Swap available.

If you don't have Armor March available to you, try a flier with Guidance instead as the team will have way more mobility with even just Guidance and Swap available (being able to Swap your flier one square over to allow more allies to teleport is really convenient).