Verminion - strategies vs human players

[PotatoTree]

Hey guys. I know the verminion playerbase is really really small, and as such there are basically no videos of high-level verminion play, so I decided to make a couple to show what I do in verminion pvp:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydfRsnloapk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFYXY9mlgJ0

I'm curious if anyone else have any tips to share.

Edit:

Faster minion recast tournament: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCmcMYY7pQA

Poppet only tournament https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSKAv8MPfLw

Bomb-cleanse strat https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymnHFUXhuRY

[Myon88]

Nice videos, I see you're still at it. It's a pity I'm on Elemental otherwise I'd hit you up for some matches. It's pretty much the same over here. Coeurl kittens are popular, hildibrands and odins are popular, all the usual minions that are the best in their respective niches.

Something I'm seeing people start to cotton on to here is baby bats. They have 4 speed, a highly efficient 200 potency LB (which, unlike the coeurl kitten, is as wide as Odin's at the cost of being a DoT instead of instant damage). It makes them very good harassers, like a proactive kind of Rikku, because a group of them can roam the map and land LBs very easily with its huge hitbox. Their 4 speed and monster typing round out their very favourable stats, as not many minions are equipped to pin them down - let alone poppet types which suffer from the greatest dearth of good speedy minions.

The other cheeky thing I'm sure people over there do too is tech swap to black coeurls once you have the game in the bag and want to seal the deal. Sometimes your enemy manages to stabilize the match but has crystals on their last legs. Rather than try and win a final decisive fight and risk an upset, they pump out black coeurls and use their direct damage LB to bypass any turtling strategies. Like other top tier minions they have no glaring flaws in their stats too - 4 speed means you cannot be cornered and forced to fight, and being super effective against eyes means you can continue to threaten their search eye all the way to the end of the game.

[PotatoTree]

Thanks! I've tried baby bat in the past but I don't particularly like cheaper monster types mainly because hildy is so damn op. I actually feel like hildy needs a nerf because his existance prevents a lot of other strategies from being valid.

I also added another video to my list, this time with more from the previous "faster minion recast" tournament, which I guess means faster minion summons.

[Myon88]

Random thought, but I was looking at the minions added recently and the Hellpup from feast seems like a decent opener minion. I normally open with 6 coeurl kittens from the midde and go straight for the search eye, but the hellpup being effective vs eyes (and costing 15 so you can open with 4) can serve the exact same function.

What interests me is their LB which costs only 20 points (20 seconds of waiting) and is a summoning recast time reduction. It looks really useful with opening minions as it will let you ramp your army out a bit quicker. They wouldn't be a mainstay in your army for the whole match of course, but purely as an opener, a set of 4 of them just might edge coeurl kittens out as my minion of choice.

[Myon88]

Something really interesting I learned today from a JP player I ran into, is that the "Action party is withdrawn from the battlefield immediately afterwards" status inflicted by certain LBs can be removed by "Removes detrimental effects from allies" type LBs.

You can do some really cheeky things with it since there is a considerable time lag between using an LB that sacrifices the casting minion, and when the action party is actually withdrawn. Things like a swarm of Robonyans that can freely use their selfdestruct ability and then get cleansed afterward so they don't die themselves. I assume it'll work the same way for Wind-up Gentleman's and Wind-up Tonberry's LBs.

Quite interesting, and not often I learn something completely new like that.

[PotatoTree]

Oh wow that's pretty interesting. I tried it out and it does seem to work, but for hildy it also wipes off the atk buff, so you have to be careful with the timing. Paired with robonyan or gilgamesh it can be pretty devastating too. I will try to practice with it a bit and see how it goes.

[PotatoTree]

So I've done several practice matches, and I found the strategy to be pretty good, but it's hard to tell without someone good to test against. I made a video on a few matches of using the strategy against a few high points people:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymnHFUXhuRY


After making this video I cleaned it up a bit more and now I'm pretty good with it. It's also pretty strong from this particular tournament (fast AP regen). Right now I'm not sure what I like better, hildy or gilgamesh, as gilgamesh allows me to spend like a bunch of minion points on something else, but hildy allows me to protect the tech units from an opponents ball of atk buffed minions.

The weakness is that spreading out is a bit harder since your ball isn't as mobile and requires a lot of summoning points to support. Mandy spam on the left and right is actually harder to deal with than usual. If you set up and take the centre, you can use hildy to run to the sides and use the lb, then run back and cleanse. Also if the opponent rushes before you can set up the combo it can also be difficult to work with.

This might be the next top tier strat, but I also think that it may be so good that it needs some more effective counters. Running 4 gilgamesh into a ball and exploding seems like a good counter, as well as traps. The apkallu's range ability might work too. A group of apkallu's is already very deadly since they are so tanky.

In the future, they need to add a spell cancellation minion, something that creates a bubble around your minions for 10s or so that causes all abilities to be removed for both you and the opponent. Or maybe a minion that sets all AP points to 0 fieldwide, or prevents abilities for 10s fieldwide.

[phantom23]

Kan-E is the only 4 speed star minion that can keep up with Hildy and Gilgamesh to cleanse the buff or the explosion. Its just to expensive. Any competent player will be all over you and your crystals.


You come at me, im attacking you at the other side of the map, you go to deal with me at that side, im now attacking you from this side of the map. You spread your forces and now you die. You dont spread and hold 1 side you lose a crystal or 2. You can see were im going with this.

It takes to much time to set up and its is expensive. For a slower minion all I need to kill is one and the cleanse strategy is dead on its track. To many holes in the strategy to be the new meta.

I will say it did save my but this tournament, would have gone 29/30 if it was not for it. Basically same guy i was beating over and over finally manage to make me slip. Spread me out to much and got me down to 1 full and severely damaged crystals. I sacrifice the 2 to start setting up the Hildabrand & Kan-E minions (only reason this worked was because of the rules) He comes at me full force I let him it my final crystal till hildy was ready, had a minion of light breaking his crystal , pop the abilities and manage to kill them all, now he is empty so I gate rushed him. Break all 3 de-spwan hildy and zerg him with minion of lights for the kill. In reality all he had to do was summon 4 black cats on the last gate and he would have won easy.

In the future, they need to add a spell cancellation minion, something that creates a bubble around your minions for 10s or so that causes all abilities to be removed for both you and the opponent. Or maybe a minion that sets all AP points to 0 fieldwide, or prevents abilities for 10s fieldwide.

That will change the meta. It will kill the buff Zerg entirely.

[PotatoTree]

Too bad the 3 of us here are all on different datacenters. I would love to face some good players, I haven't had an exciting match in the longest time.

I do prefer to use either hildy+robo+serpent or gilg+kan-E, but I don't really like kan-e+hildy. With the first combo, you can do 4-5 serpents and 5-6 robos, and still have crystal breakers at the flanks and 4 roaming lbing hildies (just move to center after the lbs and move the hatchlings to meet them halfway. For gilg, I use kan-E to keep up, but I feel like there's no map control.

The meta around me seems to be buffed minions too, although I haven't had any issues with it using rikku and some micro. There needs to be some more trap counters too, because I'm doing so well with rikku that I get about 1 rageout per tourney about it being p2w. Verminion is some serious business.

[Myon88]

Yeah I'm still winning all my matches with coeurl kittens being 90% of my units. With good micro they're very difficult to counter because of their 4 speed, even if you're up against monster types you can just snipe with your LB and run away/harass somewhere else. Being able to threaten their search eye at any point is a huge advantage too. Only baby bats seem to have the potential to keep them in check, since they also have 4 speed and their LB is much wider and easier to aim - but a few wind-up gentlemen will counter them in turn. There are still a lot of people I see running ATK buff type units (fenrir pup, wind-up succubus, etc), but in my opinion the direct damage LBs are superior.

As for that new strat, I didn't see the guy again as he stopped queuing after I took the match off him, so I didn't really get to test out effective strategies against it. But it does seem like a very all-in, deathball kind of strategy since you require your minions to be clumped together. I guess you either want to disrupt it early while it's being put together, and hit him all over the map simultaneously. Winning a straight up fight I think is possible with good micro, but much more risky for the attacker since a misplay means you'll eat a very costly selfdestruct explosion.

On a side note I finally passed the 3000 rank points mark. I haven't seen anyone else on my DC cross that yet - there are maybe 4 or 5 players that are 2000+, and maybe 20'ish people above 1000 - so it took a long time because I was only getting 1 point per win from everyone except the 2000+ players.

Edit:

The apkallu's range ability might work too. A group of apkallu's is already very deadly since they are so tanky.

By the way, does anyone know exactly what the apkallu minion LB does? I know it says "Converts auto-attacks to ranged attacks", which makes it sound like it lets them attack from range, but I don't believe that's the case. I might be wrong, but I believe its a mistranslation and is more along the lines of "Converts auto-attacks to AoE attacks" (it's a single-target minion by default).

The reason I think so (I don't have the minion so I can't test it myself) is I fought someone spamming apkallus once and I was wondering why the units I sent to fight it were melting the moment the LB was triggered. I never saw them firing at me from range, so I can only assume the dps increase was coming from their attacks cleaving instead of hitting single targets. The second thing is a bit more of a stretch, but the wind-up magitek bit is an AoE minion by default and its LB is called "All range attack" - so I'm just wondering if they both share the same root word in Japanese or something, and the apkallu's LB was mistranslated.