User blog:MasterKnight/Pat Fusty gameplay/balance improvement suggestions

(X-Posted from here with reformatting done as necessary. I'm hoping for more positive reception than reddit's usual skimmers would provide.)

Suggested changes (before anybody goes TLDR):


 * Clarification on what is going on with Pat's AOE hit missing bloons if that is intended to be a feature
 * Rallying Roar to provide self-buff of 1.25x attack rate (or 80%s in terminology reddit user Topper64 uses)
 * Rallying Roar L14 to provide buff of 1.25x attack rate (or 80%s), stacking multiplicatively with above (Pat's self-buff to attack time would be a net value of 1.5625x attack rate, or 64%s)
 * Rallying Roar L14 Damage Boost 3 -> 2; Original Damage Boost of 3 restricted to L19+ (credit to Qwertyxp2000 for this)
 * Rallying Roar L19 to improve self-buff to also add +1 Damage
 * Stun time to non-blimps L13 changed from 0.3s to 0.6s (credit to Qwertyxp2000 for this again)

Over the years, I had caught on that the Mighty Glacier, especially hybridized with the Melee Tornado, tends to draw the short straw in game balance. The cause involves the simple point that power means nothing if you can't hit your foe. Some games, like Super Smash Bros., aggravate it with how getting hit gets any attack you may be throwing out cancelled with too little condition, to the point of having speedster bias in every single installment. Kid Icarus Uprising provides a useful fix in the Armor Powers (Super Armor and Counter, primarily) that turn the base unconditional flinching into a design strength that proved to be the gift that kept on giving, and still thought to keep going by mixing in Powers such as Black Hole to discourage just staying away from the obvious heavyman all day long. Even if more options would still have been nice, the Armor Powers definitely added gameplay to the aspect of overcoming a range combat disadvantage in a manner that provided its definite contribution to an 11K word blog post of mine. I can also point to Axes in Secret of Evermore drawing the short straw with no truly unique strengths to them to have them better at competing with the other weapon types, though they are still playable enough from the charged L3 attack's extreme windup and duration working to its favor via pseudo intangibility, which at least allowed for this to happen. The important point is for the Mighty Glacier to work off of more technical gameplay to get to be the gift that keeps on giving.

Enter Pat Fusty, who is of course a gorilla. Pat is what you expect: he deals high Damage and high Pierce, at the cost that his attack speed is mediocre with even worse improvement rate, and his range is bottom of the barrel. Pat's DPS in his basic attack uptime is still above the curve, but Pat also has an additional weakness of not being able to do anything against Camo at all without support. While Pat can smash Leads on his own, this is actually the standard for Heroes, and doesn't seem otherwise because Quincy and Brickell don't damage Leads with their basic attacks, only the supporting ones. Pat's activation abilities are Rallying Roar, which buffs himself and all nearby allies to deal more Damage; and MOAB Squeeze, which lets Pat squeeze a MOAB hard at the cost of not attacking anything else during the hug.

Pat has a notable reliance on Rallying Roar when all is said and done, although his stun and knockback slap do try to mitigate issues. Rallying Roar has some definite bias toward faster tower support, even if you wouldn't want too much power-based tower support with Pat anyway, not when you'd want to worry about Camo and fast targets. This does at least give Pat some gameplay with his tower support, but a reliance on tower support makes Pat's short range even more pronounced and can make his above the curve DPS against slower targets and floods an even bigger waste.

An appropriate Hero to compare to would be Gwendolin, who similarly provides a buff to nearby towers. Heat-It-Up doesn't seem like much to boost Pierce compared to Damage, but it has a base duration of 8 seconds, it allows the affected towers to pop Leads which higher DPS towers have some problem with, the boost range is higher, and perhaps most importantly, it gets applied passively by Gwendolin's attacking and can also be globally/manually applied by using Firestorm, which naturally has a longer cooldown time than Rallying Roar, but makes up for it by dealing damage to all bloons on screen too. It's arguable which buff is better, but I can safely say Heat-It-Up is definitely easier to use especially when it actually helps against DDTs. Gwendolin's own attack is strong in its own right as well since it gets a burn effect at Level 6 to accommodate the relative sniping mixed with fast attacking. Pat gets to stun bloons with his L6 benefit on top of the knockback slap being around, but that still requires him to hit them first, and Gwen still has the advantage of using Cocktail of Fire to potentially hit Camos on her own. Now sure, Gwen can't damage Purples earlier on, but supporting defenses would be able to do that anyway, marginalizing how Rounds 25 has Purples, if because the Round 24 Camo Green and and Round 25 Purples are only back-to-back on Reverse Mode. Gwendolin also gains level ups faster with her lower EXP requirements, so she will consistently be at a higher level.

As to Pat's Big Squeeze ability, it does allow Pat some leeway against standalone blimps, namely one-shotting blimp layers and stunning the children, but Pat has to expend committal time on it instead of attacking other targets if those are around, which is inevitable against later rounds. The cooldown for Big Squeeze is 20 seconds, but this only make it more fair to compare it to Gwendolin's Cocktail of Fire, which while nowhere near as capable against higher tier lone targets can tear through clusters like nobody's business and doesn't eat through Gwendolin's regular attack time.

Pat can at least still achieve this among other points such as Patzone stuff, but the issue to bring up isn't viability. It's fun factor and options.

The thing about the other Heroes is that all of their activation abilities provide gameplay that pays off in a more consistent and especially coherent manner. Quincy gets attack showering that can marginalize key threats. Gwendolin scorches floods. Striker Jones has a fast cooldown activation ability that causes stun. Obyn plants deterrent to the likes of Camos and Purples. Churchill suddenly damages Blacks/Zebras and deals bonus damage to Ceramics and blimps off of a buff from an activation ability that has above average cooldown rate. Brickell's first activation improve her own firing rate and likely have her pistol damage Leads. Adora's provides her added range and the ability to damage Purples. Even Ezili can at least use Heartstopper to gimp Regens and can consider MOAB Hex to wreck MOABs if she doesn't mind losing pop count. Where is Pat Fusty's activation in all of this? Adding Damage, which has shown effectiveness when supporting the likes of B5 Tack Shooter, but when you start involving the higher Damage towers, it starts falling flat, and I can tell you how added Damage doesn't have the most visible effect in a more chaotic situation, the very sort of thing where Pat is supposed to thrive. Particularly when Pat is standalone, Rallying Roar's Damage boost just becomes subject to law of diminishing.

Qwertyxp2000 has suggested lowering Pat's EXP requirements, and I myself am tempted to agree on principle, but I can see that this, as well as the potential idea of lowering his price, would only be out of character, particularly when Pat is supposed to have moderacy against spaced Yellows/Pinks/Purples. I am suggesting that Pat have Rallying Roar issue him a personal attack rate boost. It wouldn't have to be a big boost, as long as there would be clearer effectiveness with the big guy himself, even doubling as a burst method against fast targets. The important thing would be to have Pat Fusty able to function as somebody other than a glorified buff bot, using gameplay to make sure of this.

Improved attack speed would be adding to DPS in a more neutral manner than favoring Fragile Speedsters, and more importantly, it would be consistently visible because of the tempo changes. Reducing the Damage buff of Rallying Roar at L14 to L18 would be the counterbalance to make sure the 1 Damage towers (Tack Zone, Bloonjitsu Master, Airburst Darts, and Poplust at the very least) would be nerfed overall. I also added the point that Pat's hitting ability does need to be clarified about like what I called out here in curiosity. I did have the game on Fast Forward, so the possibility of a lag bug had been brought up to me, but I wouldn't complain about an actually built-in miss chance for the AoE as long as it's clarified and not at a ridiculous chance of missing--even a 1/256 miss chance would actually make spaced bloons into something to account for.

At the end of the day, like what reddit user Cevris had been posting with his Tower Trouble series, what I provide for suggestions are just that: suggestions. The rest of my post is all about establishing what would work with them, but I would hope the developers would understand the ideas well enough to comprehend where I'm coming from. If they come up with pleasant surprises, that would be better, as long as they are showing TLC about the balancing efforts. I certainly have no doubt that Fusty The Snowman would be pleased by welcome developments.