So we have finally ended the Patriots Bounties. Onward to People’s Guard.
For many, including members of my alliance (we are a successful one), the 2 Patriots Bounties were somewhat frustrating to play. There were simply too many mech bounties. It seemed like the devs’ thinking was that, since Kobold is a bio hero, there ought to be more mech spawns to benefit from elemental advantage.
Unfortunately this did not work out in real life.
(I) Kobold’s Flaws (as a Bounty Hero)
For one, Kobold’s damage output is poor. Despite the increased bonuses that featured heroes get, Kobold could hardly carry a team into battle.
- At plat 8 star, I frequently got around 7+/8+ million damage from Kobold, piloting her manually.
- If the bounty target came with stun minions she would deal even less damage because you would either have to waste time clearing out the minions first, or risk having them stun you in the course of the bounty. Both are lose-lose situations.
- Piloting her on auto is even worse because she spends too much time casting her skills which are useless in bounty.
- Overall she is not a very enjoyable bounty hero to play since she is comparatively weak (and as the community has covered before, bounty is fun because we love high-damage bounty heroes).
To make things worse, Kobold didn’t get ANY support from her other Patriots faction heroes because all of them are energy heroes and therefore the additional mech bounties were the anti-element of the other DPS Patriots (especially Sapphyre and Fortress). Basically, Kobold had zero synergy with her faction.
As a result, of the above, Mech bounties did not clear easily and tended to accumulate. It was a bit of a chore to clear them up.
In contrast, because there were so many other Patriots using energy element with bonuses, bio (and to a lessser extent, energy) bounties could be cleared REALLY QUICKLY.
All the above factors contributed, in my view, to Kobold being a poor bounty hero.
(II) Actually, Kobold could and should have been better!
In my view, there were a few ways Kobold could and should have been a better bounty hero.
First, and most obviously, if she were released as a mech. It would have promoted synergy with her faction rather than, as was the case here, anti-synergy.
It would also have been different, if Kobold was a high-damage bio who could carry a bounty team on her own. It would not have made the increased mech spawn rate to be such a nightmare.
And Kobold was also a poor fit for Patriots. If she was released in any other faction she would have fared better because she would have gotten some support from other heroes of the same elemental typing.
Lastly, be that as it may, since Kobold was released as a non-dps bio hero, HHG should not have given more elemental weightage to mech bounties for spawning purposes. The bounty spawn rate ought to have been equal between all 3 elements to take into account the fact that Kobold just isn’t good at clearing bounties and did not synergise with any other Patriots.
It is not the case that support heroes automatically suck in bounty. Min, Wesson Kobold enjoyed reasonable bounty success because they were released in the right faction and in the right element. All that needs to be done is to pay attention to these details.
(III) People’s Guard Bounty Next
It looks like Kaishi will be a bio hero in People’s Guard. We don’t expect the same problems here for the next PG bounties because
- Kaishi seems to be a DPS hero
- People’s Guard has Mauler and Francoise who are also biochem and it would not be a disaster to have increased mech spawns to take advantage of Kaishi’s elemental typing because Mauler and Francoise can help out
- People’s Guard has tri-elemental heroes (Savage, Castellan and Ronin) and hence all bounties are covered regardless of the element.
(IV) Conclusion - lesson learned
Bounties are an important feature of the game and enjoyed by MANY. HHG must calibrate each newly released hero not only for PVP balance purposes but also from the bounty hero perspective.
In my view, the devs didn’t do a great job for Kobold (as a bounty hero) but as long as the lessons are learned and these considerations are thought through the next time round, things will be fine.
Thanks for reading this far! By the way if you agree with the points, do make a reply to say so otherwise the devs might think it’s no big deal. (And I really, really don’t want a similar situation to happen again, so let us as a community get together to feedback these things).