The hit resolution changes favor lopsided games

[Valence]

After playing hundred of ranked games by now, I do believe that the recent hit detection changes do favor lopsided games where one team just steamrolls the other team.

It is overall harder to secure kills due to the unresponsiveness of the system, combined with pocket regen healers that can heal back to full a target that overextends. If a team doesn't have regen healers, especially AST, then it is already at a clear disadvantage as this can make or break games.

As a result, getting kills relies a lot more into coordinating bursts, which lower ranks (aka below crystal/diamond) are unable to properly do, and which isn't a given either in diamond. Coordinated bursts however will oneshot KO people (like before tbh). This means that it puts even more the onus on bursting than ever, and a team being able to do so or not is a way bigger deciding factor in winning games than it used to be. Even with a team that was unable to burst, while at a disadvantage, it was still possible to secure kills, but with all of this combined with healers? A lot less so, which makes the whole outcome much, much more binary.

I really don't like it.

[Mawlzy]

After playing hundred of ranked games by now, I do believe that the recent hit detection changes do favor lopsided games where one team just steamrolls the other team.

It is overall harder to secure kills due to the unresponsiveness of the system, combined with pocket regen healers that can heal back to full a target that overextends. If a team doesn't have regen healers, especially AST, then it is already at a clear disadvantage as this can make or break games.

As a result, getting kills relies a lot more into coordinating bursts, which lower ranks (aka below crystal/diamond) are unable to properly do, and which isn't a given either in diamond. Coordinated bursts however will oneshot KO people (like before tbh). This means that it puts even more the onus on bursting than ever, and a team being able to do so or not is a way bigger deciding factor in winning games than it used to be. Even with a team that was unable to burst, while at a disadvantage, it was still possible to secure kills, but with all of this combined with healers? A lot less so, which makes the whole outcome much, much more binary.

I really don't like it.

Do you have a sense for how much that is driven by the hit detection, and how much by the presence on one team of an AST? I realize the power of the latter is to some extent a consequence of the former, but intuitively I would expect the hit detection issues to be frustrating but otherwise wash out.

[Valence]

Hard to quantify. This is a very subjective feeling I have and while I can try and translate it into mechanical explanations, it still remains relatively volatile. Would need to see when AST gets nerfed. Instant heals shouldn't be able to output that much.

[Mawlzy]

Hard to quantify. This is a very subjective feeling I have and while I can try and translate it into mechanical explanations, it still remains relatively volatile. Would need to see when AST gets nerfed. Instant heals shouldn't be able to output that much.

Understood, thanks.

[Valence]

I'll just add that before the changes, there was also a lot more overkill than there is post change on burst targets: now, either you just meet the target's HP threshold, or you don't. This means that securing kills outside of the burst target is greatly reduced comparatively to what was possible to achieve before, and securing burst kills is by extent harder, but not unachievable. This means that uncoordinated teams that don't know how to burst are put at a much worse disadvantage than before if pit against a team that bursts better because they cannot alleviate the imbalance by securing some opportunity kills here and there as well on their own.

I am of course not speaking of steamroll games that last under 2 minutes with zero kills on the losing side with twice less damage done, those already happened before, and they still happen today because either one or more players aren't pulling their weight in attack and soaking damage, or the Guarding snowball effect (more on that below) strikes too hard. I am talking about games that have cropped up significantly which end up relatively fast but not as fast, where one team has all the kills and the other has none or at best one, but the big difference is that the damage output on both sides is similar. This clearly hints to me at that a team was just unable to break through the other no matter what, often because of unfocused burst combined with oppressive ASTs and tank presence in the other team.

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On the Guarding snowball effect: Guard is a powerful tool, but as soon as you Guard, you stop doing DPS. This as a result significantly reduces the pressure on the enemy team (much like if they actually killed you), and then when you retreat and pot, same thing. If your team starts doing this more than the opposing team, then it can tend to snowball a lot since the enemy team has more and more leeway to pressure your remaining active members while they'll have in turn to defend and Guard a lot more instead of attacking, which feeds upon itself until complete team wipe. Usually this also results in staggers where people respawn not all at once and especially in random games, people are very reluctant at retreating and losing crystal progression, or just looking as if they were refusing to fight while their remaining 2 team mates are slowly dying on point. There is after all, a reason why a decent amount of games sometimes can look like a total reversal where one team that got dominated and farmed early on due to that snowball effect, then respawned staggered and kept being farmed, finally manages to get every of their members together near the end of the crystal's path and pop their LBs and wipe the floor, gaining back the advantage, staggering the winning team, and completely reversing the game until they finally win to a point where it looks like the dominating team threw the game and leaves everyone wondering what happened.

Within the current model after the changes, if a team is just unable to pierce through the other in spite of their competency just because everything is about burst more than ever, then that snowball effect tends to play against them even more due to the amount of games where you get kills on both side are a lot rarer as a result, I feel.