Been a pretty frequent pvp pet battler,
However all I seem to run into now and have HUGE issue in facing is tripple sandstorm teams, anubisath idol, quiraji guardling, and living sandling or similar model pet.
Hoses dot, aoe and in general a lot of other pet strategies.
I understand there is always a meta in every aspect of competitive play, however my issue is with that the sandstorm archetype is adversely affecting the diversity of the overall meta.
Seems to be a case of “Anti-sandstorm” and hope to hit that team or loose, or play something else and hope not to encounter sandstorm.
Using “Anti-sandstorm” as I am unsure what constitutes to that type of team atm.
Anyone else horrendously bored of the sandstorm meta?
Pre Shadowlands the meta was already Sandstorm to counter aoe spam. Then going into Shadowlands the damage of Sandstorm and a few other weathers were buffed to 45 base which is usually about 700 damage. These buffs make no sense and aren’t in line with most abilities other than Twilight Meteorite, Avalanche, Poison Protocol, Great Sting etc. Why use something like Surge of power when you can get similar damage and weather effect. So already you are in a way forced into using the pets with access to one of about a dozen abilities.
Like you mentioned Sandstorm specifically creates an issue regarding viable strategies more than the other weathers. The shield effect is obviously strong vs aoe especially when you have multiple Sandstorm users to change the weather and I imagine that is the primary reason people are using it.
The problem is it’s strong vs soo many comps aswell dot comps, multi hit abilities, plagued blood teams and other weather effects. It’s just simply too good vs too many other strategies.
The simplest way to counter Sandstorm is Darkness teams and they were until BFA common enough to keep them from dominating. Once Bone Serpent/Haunt were nerfed and dropped off in popularity it became the strongest weather through Guardlings becoming top tier. In Shadowlands the problem with Darkness teams is they struggle Vs Anomalus due to viable Darkness pets speed breakpoints being slower than 297 and their Darkness combos not being effective vs the magic Racial.
I’m also bored of facing Sandstorm especially when often it’s paired with a healing pet to stall out a game gradually taking your team down fairly comfortably if cycled through.
In my opinion the most recent changes went in the opposite way to what was required. The aoe abilities needed to be nerfed not a handful of abilities brought up to that power level. Now the difference between meta and non meta is huge. I don’t think that if played reasonably well a team using multiple buffed abilities could lose to a team that isn’t using them
It’s like somebody in there, on finally understanding the irrelevance and ineptness of the Shattered Defenses changes, panicked and entered themindset of the Designer’s Syllogism:
We must change something.
This is something.
Therefore we must change this.
The people who design pet battles are, or at least were, very clever. I don’t see how either the announced Shattered Defenses changes or this unannounced imbalancing of weather can be the same people.
I do see why shattered defense was addressed especially with patch 8.2 where so many of the WQs being done with the doom bird combo. However the solution should have been going into Shadowlands and different boss mechanisms added. It’s probably because nerfing these abilities was a quick win short term solution. Odd really that legacy content that they historically don’t care about was primarily affected by these changes.
You’re correct that the original development behind pet battles was strong. Now however there are a magnitude of problems when development choices only add to them never solve them. Sandstorm et al are now way to powerful and ensure soo much value and throughput. I believe that these changes are specifically designed to create artificial metas instead of allowing them to evolve organically. It means that when they make some changes every expansion it’s easy for them to address the issues without wondering if there could be unintended impacts.
My point about Shattered Defenses is that what they actually did was a Heath Robinson way to accomplish the smallest of trims. I was quite alarmed about their original announcement, but it piffled out into almost nothing. On Xu-Fu’s, only a few strats were much affected. As I argued on the Beta forums, Shattered Defenses proper was the wrong target, and the change they made overnerfed the raptors while leaving Ikky almost unaffected in practice. Badly judged.
What I’m wondering is whether, seeing that the Shattered Defenses change wasn’t going to make much difference, they made a knee-jerk reaction to buff weathers just to have a significant change to show for SL. I can’t see why they would not have pre-announced it if it was part of a considered plan.
The original Pandaria line-up, as it settled by the end of Mists, was pretty solid, and I really don’t like it when they mess with the balance of things like Sandstorm and raptors that had been working perfectly fine for 8 years.
As you say, the problems we have now are caused by later choices piled onto one another, so I can’t see a valid design goal for making Sandstorm et al, which were fine before, so overpowered.
Contrast this with the Undead/AoE nerf at the end of WoD, which was perfectly judged. (OK, they missed the BS, but the rest was spot-on.)
What I dislike most about the stampede nerf was it has changed how the mechanic actually works.
The changes that were made to the weather’s damage don’t seem to take into account the actual effects the weather will provide. The level of damage reduces the amount of counterplay you have vs teams using them. You can’t easily come back from someone 1 or 2 shotting your pet, in reality if you lose a pet in 2 turns whilst only landing one attack the game is already over.
If they intended to bring it inline with the aoe abilities then they must realise those abilities are already too strong.
Elementals aren’t affected by the hit reduction of Sandstorm but the shielding still applies which is the biggest issue with the weather.
Strangely Toxic Fumes the new weather makes elementals count as poisoned. It must work as having two debuffs as the extra round of poison doesn’t apply. Just an example of the spaghetti code used in pet battles.
For another example, Toxic Bite also increases periodic damage done by the bitten pet, not taken. Specifically tested with Tinytron by Poison Protocol vs Crawbat in Maldraxxus.
This was brought up when toxic bite was released on these forums and a forum moderator replied that the tooltip didn’t specify it wouldn’t increase dots by the target.
In my opinion the damage increase by the debuffed pet can’t have been intentionally because it breaks some of the dot aoe abilities and scorched earth. This unintended buff to the debuffed pet just makes the ability not remotely viable.