Lord of Verminion - An Awful Frustrating Experience

[Ayirez]

Hello, first off I'd like to thank you for taking the time to read this. Second off I'd like to apologize for probably being the thousandth person to go over this, but I'd like to express my views regardless.

So, Lord of Verminion is as a concept extremely fun and appealing, the system in place is fairly decent as well; Having to defend and strike Entrances, Shield, Search Eye, and Crystals is by no means a bad design. That is however where my praise ends.

While LoV's potential is fun it comes up short in several aspects. The first most notable aspect is that there is an enormous lack of balance between minions. Two easy examples of this disparity are the Coeurl Kitten and the Wolf Pup. At first glance they may seem balanced, their stats aren't too absurd when compared to other minions around them, but its their cost as well as the synergy between their stats and abilities that causes such a hard and disgusting disparity. The Wolf Pup is by far the most spammed minion, and so I will use it as an example (in fact, I just lost my second game in a row where my opponent exclusively used Wolf Pups).

To begin with, at a cost of 15 they are just above the lowest of the low. This means you can rapidly summon them and "Zerg Rush" your opponent. That in and of itself is annoying, but shouldn't be game breaking. The problem then lies in their capabilities. With four stars in speed they cannot be any faster, and this means that not only can you summon them quickly but you can utilize them extremely fast as well. Any minion with less than four stars in speed will be unable to pursue and destroy them as they can simply run away, but they are also unable to flee themselves and get ripped apart by the wave of Wolf Pups.

And herein lays the problem. Wolf Pups are easy to stockpile, easy to get out into the field, and their ability allows them to have extreme power in numbers. As four of them can allow the ENTIRE group to gain 40ATK (boosting them all to a respective 105ATK) they become a force of complete destruction, and, as soon as the buff wears off you can simply activate it again, as it only takes four to buff the entire group which leaves you with several more still charged. While their health and defence aren't exactly amazing, it's enough for them to live long enough to tear their way through any minion, even two groups of 30 cost minions pale in comparison against a simple group of wolf pup spam.

And, once you've lost your minions to a Wolf Pup user you've lost the game. There is zero chance to recover. No matter what I've tried with all my various minions (of which no beginner players would have) I cannot defeat a full set of Wolf Pups.

So, Wolf Pups are in their own right vastly imbalanced, but if that were it then it should be a simple thing to fix right? Well.. no. Even if Wolf Pups were to be nerfed into the ground the game would still be broken, and would still be boring. The reason for this is due to how many minions have USELESS abilities. Simply put, some abilities are so situational that summoning the minions to use them isn't worth the player's time. The minions simply aren't balanced for it.

For example, the Wide-eyed Fawn has an ability that "Renders all allies within range immune to attacks by monsters". While this sounds great, it isn't, as it only lasts five seconds long. At 400HP, 55ATK, 40DEF, and 4 stars in speed, they lack any real combat prowess, and while they can move around quickly this only ends up allowing them to move quickly to their deaths. Now, before you say "But you see, they're supposed to be used with another set of minions", I know. But you the reader must understand, their whole purpose is a 5s immunity to specifically monsters. Against other critters they are useless. Against poppets, useless. Against gadgets, useless. That is roughly 66% of other minions that they are useless against, and of the remaining 33% they can be used against they're too weak to help fend them off and their 5s immunity can easily be thwarted in various ways (for instance act as though you're engaging the group with the Fawns in them and as soon as they activate it retreat from them. Remember, the Fawns are fast but that doesn't necessarily mean that the minions they're buffing with immunity are too).

But wait... there's more. Let's use Cherry Bombs as an example this time. These lil' dudes are more useful than Fawns are for sure, but still come up short. At a cost of 10 they are fairly easy to summon, but unlike the previous two they only have two stars in speed which means they're quite a bit slower to get into the fray. This isn't a huge drawback, but only if their stats are balanced for it, and sadly they are not. At 390HP, 30ATK, and 40DEF they are quite weak in combat, and for good reason. Their main ability is to self destruct as bombs are known for, causing 300 damage to all those within their range. But, this has a couple major drawbacks, that is that it costs more than the average ability thus making them useless for a longer period of time when summoning, and that it withdraws them after the ability has been used.

Even so, sacrificing 4 minions to destroy an entire army of Wolf Pups is by no means a bad trade right? Well no, of course not, but that's assuming that A) Your enemy is bad enough to waltz their entire army into bombs and B) One of the four doesn't get killed by the Wolf Pups before you can activate the ability. With 390HP and 40DEF that means it takes 6 hits from a group of buffed Wolf Pups to kill a Bomb. When you have 16 Wolf Pups it becomes rather feasible that the rush of them can off a Bomb before you can detonate them. But that's only if your enemy decides to not think things through. If instead they fight your four bombs with only four of their own Wolf Pups, you are forced to take the trade and self destruct. If you do not then their Wolf Pups will win the skirmish with no casualties.

But I purposely left one thing out while explaining all that; Wolf Pups, and indeed almost all minions I can think of, have more than 300HP. Even in the even that you manage to self destruct a group of minions successfully, your bombs will be gone and their minions will still live. The only way to properly use them then is to have other minions alongside them, but due to their slow movement and the typical movement speed of other minions it's simply not worth engaging them at all when you can march your army to another point of interest. You have three Crystals, taking one as a loss while destroying your opponents other two is quite a fair trade.

Finally I'll point out one last thing I've noticed. After trying many things against a pack of Wolf Pups I decided to spam a minion close to them in every way but of the monster category, as monsters are strong against critters. But how strong? There is no indication anywhere in the game that tells us how much of an advantage they get, and, upon my attempt of spamming the Succubus minion which can boost their attack to 95, whatever advantage they had didn't amount to any noticeable amount. They STILL lost against the Wolf Pups, even when they out numbered them (as the Succubus cost 10 and the Wolf Pups cost 15).

So, to wrap things up, Wolf Pups are currently broken, higher cost minions aren't worth the resources as lower cost ones can still decimate them, a massive amount of minions are useless due to their abilities, and type advantages seem to have little to no effect on the outcome.

This game is so laughably broken and frustrating that I've spent a good hour of my time writing this in the inane hope that someone from SE will read it and have any power at all to inform their higher ups and have the team fix up the game. I will list a couple ways to fix things before I go though.

1) Remove speed differences from minions, with them all varying in speed it causes balancing them to become much harder than you realize. Giving minions abilities that increase or slow movement speed is still fine, so long as it is small.

2) Remove niche abilities in favour of simple but effective ones. No one needs to become immune to monsters for 5s, we need to be able to fight back against any enemy effectively.

3) Increase the HP of minions across the board. Doing this would allow more thought to be put into skirmishes, for players to both activate all the different abilities minions can offer and move them around in optimal ways.

4) Probably the most important suggestion I'll make though; Remove ability charging differences from minions while increasing the overall time it takes, spawn minions with abilities already charged, and change the number of minions needed to activate abilities from 4 to 3. This would mean that things are fair between players, that they can both activate their abilities against one another when the time comes, and making them able to do so with smaller groups. This would also increase the variance of minions a player can summon in a game, as four 30 cost minions makes players use up HALF their total resources. If it were 3 instead this would mean that instead of 2 groups of different minions you could have 3 groups of different minions (which obviously applies to lower cost tiers, meaning there would be a 50% increase in the variety of minions you can have on the field at once).

Please SE, fix the things that are broken rather than creating new content that, while interesting, leaves those of us wanting to get the Penguin Prince minion hate playing the game for the four weeks it'll take to get.

[Ruri]

I doubt they will fix or look at LOV again. I'd rather they concentrate on new content then fix something barely anyone plays.

[Cidel]

I doubt they will fix or look at LOV again. I'd rather they concentrate on new content then fix something barely anyone plays.

Yeah, I wonder how much serious thought and balancing goes into the stats and abilities of new minions (for how frequently they add them) for this mode. I feel like eventually they'd stop caring.

Wouldn't surprise me if they spin a wheel for new minions's stats and spitball ability ideas for the entirety of 5 minutes before they decide it's time to move-on to more pressing concerns like deciding which job/role gets stuck with a lalafell model for the next new gear group photo preview.

[PotatoTree]

Wolf pups aren't actually that bad to deal with. You can't just run into a pack of wolf pups, you have to bait their ability.

The steps to defeat a swarming player is:

1. Identify they are swarming. Play aggressive to prevent them from gathering enough minions. Force them to use their ability then run, and then strike again the second the buff falls.

2. Succubus is not the counter to Wolf Pups, mainly because of their 3 star speed. Agility is way more important than type advantage, if they can run faster then they can choose when to engage in battle, so you'll never get the upper hand. If you want a direct counter, use Fenrir Pups.

3. Use a more technical style of play. Against any swarm, I prefer to use bombs (Robonyan) + taking out search eye (like a single cat) + traps (Rikku). Other strategies include Gilgamesh + pillow cleanse, or even if you have enough micro you can literally just swarm cats and out LB them. Cats actually counter wolf pups if you hotkey your LB, because you can quickly kill the swarm before they can damage you. If you have bombs backing a strong army, you can just walk your army and roll over the crystals, they can't engage you without losing their army. But as you said, you can't just have 4 random bombs against anything, bombs are technical minions. Think of them as caster types, you need tanky minions to protect them a prevent the opponent from just saccing four pups into you (note that four pups is very expensive, it's a quarter of their minion supply. Also, summon 5-6 bombs instead of 4. I usually use 5, but use 6 if you're still practising your micro.

4. Wolf pups need to be in groups of 4 to be effective, that's 60 points worth of minions, which is gigantic. If you just keep splitting siege units to the left and right crystals they're forced to split off pups to deal with you, allowing you to catch small groups off guard. One odin and one siege unit is just 40 points worth. By microing like this you divide their ball allowing you to pick and choose how to carve out battles. You can actually just use a bunch of hildies spread around. Send them to gates, search eyes, etc, but micro them well so you run if you face 4. They must send 3-4 pups against 1 hildy, that's 45-60 cost vs 30 cost, in every small engagement you'll be ahead.

As for other general play, I made a bunch of videos:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydfR..._SG1vi5fLWD9Ge

The only thing I would agree with is the niche abilities point. I would like things like Wide-Eyed Fawn's ability to be extended to 15s to make it more usable. However, Speed and Charging are just fine as it is. The whole point is that you have to pick your composition, you can summon some powerful minions but it may take up half your food supply. There's tradeoffs you have to do, it's not as simple as summoning what is the strongest.

Not all minions are meant to be balanced by each other. 4 wolf pups are not meant to equal 6 cats in balance just because they cost similarly.

[Ayirez]

...

Yeah, watching your video I can see you're miles ahead of me in terms of skill so I do not doubt the things you've said. But, that doesn't mean the game shouldn't be overhauled and changed to be more balanced and fun. You've found ways to make it work for you, but the system is still lacking. I'm not saying they should cater to casuals over experts, as experts deserve the right to win their games, they've but a ton of time into learning and adapting after all. While you're right that not all minions are meant to be balanced to one another, there has to be SOMETHING that balances out all minions else there's zero structure to balancing. Like you said, speed is way more important than type advantage. So why have four levels of speed wherein the slowest ones may have the ability to smash crystals good, but lack in both offensive AND defensive power, making them no better than a sitting duck that can't fight back, whose ONLY purpose is to smash crystals. That's too specific, no average player is going to master this system after sitting down to play it a few times, and ultimately they're going to hate the game just as I do now. At the end of the day, what matters isn't if a system is workable and if you can find a way to have it turn out positive results (as you've clearly done and I think that's great honestly, should be proud of your accomplishments and all). What's important is that the game, the video game we sit down to play instead of.. idk, going outside or playing any of the thousands of other video games out there, is fun. And just looking at the number of players that actively play LoV, I believe we can all agree that, for the average player, it is not fun. And sadly that goes for almost all of the Gold Saucer content. I prefer Chocobo Racing to this, and I've played it a ton to try getting a great chocobo, but even that system is needlessly complex and the grind involved is ridiculous.

The system needs to be simplified and certain aspects need to be balanced across the board. Speed is one of them, (like I said, different speeds don't necessarily have to be eradicated, but they should be linked to abilities that happen for a time, not permanently). Another is to balance according to cost and make minions more or less even in terms of combat prowess based on it, as the advantage of having a single 30 cost vs three 10 costs is rather non-existent. Sure, your 30 cost can probably smack those three minions down on its own, BUT, not only do the 10 costs only need one more minion to activate their ability (which would most likely turn the tide of that skirmish completely), the advantage they gain in terms of map presence is far greater (you can send three 10's in three different directions, you can only send one 30 to one spot).

Every match I've played has devolved (or simply began) with spamming a single minion and seeing which of the two can be smashed against one another better. Even if the players at the top are as good as you are, the average player doesn't seem to be and resorts to this simple, frustrating, and extremely boring one, THAT WORKS. Hell, one thing that would revitalize this game is to cap how many of a specific minion can be summoned at once to five or six, then we wouldn't have the 16 wolf pup wave of destruction comps.

[Myon88]

You were on the right track with the wind-up succubi, but what would really have served you well would have been fenrir pups as mentioned. They're basically the monster type clone of the wolf pup - they cost the same, have the same stats, the same limit break (that buffs monsters instead of critters) - if there was a literal counter to wolf pups it would be these. They have exactly the same stats, so the only way they would lose is if your opponent played better somehow (positioning, etc). Even if you can't micro and just want to spam something, you can still win someone else doing the same by picking the right counter minion.

If you're willing to put in a bit of effort at micromanagement, baby bats are the better and universal counter to any strategy that relies on massing up a big group of single minions. Their LB is a DoT that deals 200 damage over 20 seconds (comparable to the coeurl kittens who deal 230 damage instantly), but what makes it different is its extremely wide range making it easy to aim and tag a large number of targets with it. 1 potency = 1 hp, and wolf pups have 385 hp, so it does not matter how many wolf pups your opponent has in their deathball, if you hit them with the baby bat LB twice, they will all be dead. 8 bats (or even 4 bats who come back to LB a second time) can kill 240 points/16 wolf pups if used well.

Re: bombs, yeah don't use the cherry bombs as they're slow and no one competent will get hit by them. Use Robonyan (cheap and 3 speed) or gilgamesh (expensive but 4 speed) if you really want to pull off a bomb play. You shouldn't have to though, as bombs are last resort strategies and if you play well (see above), your opponent will be the one scrambling for a solution instead.

the advantage of having a single 30 cost vs three 10 costs is rather non-existent. Sure, your 30 cost can probably smack those three minions down on its own, BUT, not only do the 10 costs only need one more minion to activate their ability (which would most likely turn the tide of that skirmish completely), the advantage they gain in terms of map presence is far greater (you can send three 10's in three different directions, you can only send one 30 to one spot).

This is true and one of the advantages that cheap swarms have over smaller groups of strong units. Something to note however is that minion resummoning time does not scale up as fast as minion costs do - that is to say a 30 cost minion doesn't take 3x longer to summon than a 10 cost minion, it's more like.. 40% longer or something. What this means is that if you focus on pumping out strong units you can max out to your 240 point cap much faster than someone spamming cheap units. This gives you a momentary advantage where, for example, a minute into the match you might have 8 hildibrands (240 points) and they only have 15 coeurl kittens (150 points). How you make use of this advantage I'll leave you to think about.

You are also correct in that speed is the most important stat by far, to the point where minions that don't have 4 speed almost might as well not exist at all. That said, I don't think it's a bad thing for only a few minions to be 'in the meta'. There are hundreds of minions in the game so it's literally impossible for all of them to be relevant, the knowledge to choose the correct ones is part of player skill as well. If you're overwhelmed by the number of minions to choose from, I recommend http://ffxiverminion.com/minions which lets you easily browse all of them. You might be surprised to find that some of the most common pets in the game are also the strongest in the metagame.

[Ayirez]

...

...

Tried some of the stuff you both said, yet I couldn't beat Couerl Kitten spam. I don't have fenrir pups so that counter isn't possible for me. They were able to kill my bats with their ability, and even when I got mine off they just ran back to their base and healed. I also tried using a trap minion to defend the last crystal I had left but all that resulted in was wasting 10 minutes of my time. I also tried sending minions (Wind-up Kojin) to other nodes in an attempt to spread out the enemy forces or take their nodes while they were ignorant, but they were able to simply smash them apart. All of this left it at a stalemate where they couldn't take my last crystal and I couldn't damage their other two, and guess who wins that exchange. I don't know why you all seem to think this is ANY fun, but it isn't, it's boring, it's a waste of time, and IF BY SOME HELL I GET THE PENGUIN PRINCE MINION I AM NEVER EVER PLAYING THIS GAME AGAIN.

Edit: Sorry for losing my temper but after losing 8/10 games to people with 300+ RP on me, people who are only ever spamming one minion which reduces the game to hardly a strategy game and more of a slap in the face, I think you can understand why I've come to hate it and these spam players unequivocally. It really is a huge waste of time, which to be fair is what games are in the first place, but that I'm having zero fun, and in fact am having the opposite and getting stressed out to all hell, makes me believe without a doubt that this mini-game is completely trash. They either should fix it, or change the achievement to get the penguin prince minion to something more reasonable, like win 1 match in 4 tournaments. Hell, what are the people in the future going to do when literally no players want to play it anymore? They'll be unable to get the Penguin Prince minion at all. But that's not something I will speculate on, it's pointless to. I'm just going to keep trying to win and get the minion before never touching this game again and suggesting to any friends that ask me about it that they stay far far away from it.

[Myon88]

It's okay to not like it, PvP activities tend to garner that reaction because unlike the rest of the game, victory is not guaranteed and humans are quite devious in ways an AI simply can't match. They're very stressful in a way that PvE activities are not, so they will never be as popular and I don't feel I have to 'convince' people to like it. If it's not for you, it's not for you.

Those are just suggestions to hopefully give you a better chance - and they will, but they require a bit of finesse to execute. It's just the nature of PvP that you can do all the right things and still lose. And that's the beauty of the game and why we find it fun. As it is now, it is objectively the most difficult activity in the game, the one with highest skillcap, and the one with the best balance because it is completely symmetrical 1v1 PvP. There isn't really anything else that comes close to it, except high level 4v4 Feast and Ultimate raids.

[Ayirez]

...

I've played League of Legends for 7 years now, I know what PvP is and how I respond to losing matches. What's worse than a broken game is a toxic community as well, so I'm thankful ffxiv isn't like that (for the most part, aside from the first tournament I entered last week, where the winner who had taken first place after I had been (I ended up third) came found me in world and said "Oh hey it's Cat!", "How are you feeling after I cucked you out of first place?". I called him disgusting and black listed him but still, what a garbage human). But that aside it is a needlessly complicated, boring, and not truly balanced game when you stop saying "well these are the meta minions" which consist of at most 5% of all minions and look at it from an overarching view. Yes, it is balanced in the terms of being completely symmetrical and in how it works in concept, but the minions are not at all balanced, and when you factor in the fact that a FUCK TON of players are going to be missing minions that give them an edge (for instance robonyan), it is by NO MEANS balanced.

Not that it's super relevant but I *did* take Game Development as my post secondary, which got me no job, woo, but it did give me knowledge of programming/digital graphics/other crap, but importantly knowledge in how games work, how specific values affect every other value that exists in the game. The "weight" of the values in question, and in LoV there are clear examples of abilities and stats that are heavily weighted, so much so that I'd say it's undeniable that this game is unbalanced.

Lastly, even if eeeeeverything about this game were balanced right now at this very moment, the community for it is so utterly dead I've often been going up against the same people repeatedly, out of the entire data center I'm on I'd wager there are no more than MAYBE 5000 active players in LoV. Multiply that across data centers and that's what, 25k? That's pathetically low for a game that boasts 10mil players, and even if we were to be fair and say only half of those are active accounts, and even if we were to say only half of active accounts even participate in the gold saucer, that'd still only be 1% of players that take part in LoV. So to say the game is balanced, or fun, is evidently incorrect. If SE spent time fixing the game, boosting the rewards for normal matches, adding in longer achievements and more weekly things (for instance a WT's section), maybe it would be thriving. But right now it's not fun, balanced, played by many, and a waste of time. Again, once I get the Penguin Prince I'm out as literally anything else in this game is more fun (even FATE grinding, and I hate grinding).

Edit: I finally got my 10 wins for the week, but twice people said that they hated me after I won and most of my wins were against people with >600RP while I'm at 950 - 1050. So in other words I stomped new players who probably feel just as frustrated as I do. I kind of hate myself too for that. But thankfully after repeatedly smashing my face against the wall that is this game your advice finally started working, so thank you for that at least.

[Myon88]

Shrug, it's as good a balance as you can reasonably expect, especially when compared to the rest of the game. An entire role (melee dps) is deadweight in frontlines and rival wings, skillspeed's still a garbage stat for most jobs, and not to mention the endless whining over optimal raid compositions and double ranged physical dominance. There will always be an optimal solution and a metagame, you'd know as much since you've played League. And just as you can pick something off-meta and outplay someone there with superior mechanical skill, so can you do the same here - there's nothing more meritocratic than that.

Even if you could raise the number of metagame relevant minions from 20 to 60, someone else would come along and complain that number isn't 120 or 200. Development budgets are not infinite, at some point you have to decide that something is good enough and put it aside for the moment while you work on something else.

I'd be very careful about drawing relationships between statistics too. Savage raids only see about 1% participation as well, so perhaps they're 'broken' too? What about ultimate? It's a fraction of a fraction of that 1%, I think less than 100 people in the world have cleared it at this point. It's ok for some things to be difficult and niche. PvP is especially intimidating to people because of its zero sum nature - someone is walking away the loser no matter what. It takes a lot of humility and self-reflection to look at it objectively and not get frustrated when that happens.