Gripes with Splat Zones

[Hokuto]

Disclaimer: take my complaints with a shaker of salt. After six months of Anarchy experience, the best rank I've been able to achieve is B+. I have either met my match here or they're kicking me in the ribs. In the grand scheme of things, I have no clue what the heck I'm doing. Also, I play solo queue without knowing common callouts or advanced "signals," so the best coordination I can do is the occasional "This way!"

I hate Splat Zones. Surprisingly, this is a relatively original complaint. All your homies hate Clam Blitz, but for whatever reason the incomprehensible ink splort makes more sense to me than Zones. I'm trying to work out why, so bear with my clueless rambling if you have more than six brain cells and can already tell what the problem is.

I can tell you now that my worst results come from Rainmaker. My frustration/lack of understanding/whatever bothers me about Zones isn't just there because I lose more than I win. Heck, even when I lose at Best Mode Tower Control, I don't walk out thinking "this mode sucks!”

Is it perhaps the niche I tend to fill? I play to splat first and foremost, which (when I succeed) works out pretty great for Tower Control and Clam Blitz. It seems to matter a little less in Zones. My weapons of choice are: Tri-Slosher Nouveau (easy splats and Tacticooler, but bad at painting), Dread Wringer (yields my best results), Splat Dualies (my Crab Tank could use some work), either N-ZAP (Cooler is self-explanatory, but where else can I get away with Super Chumps?), either Range Blaster (even worse paint than NTri!), and Heavy Edit Splatling (did I mention that I don't mind Cooler farming yet?). Also , I can't aim. Aside from Dread Wringer striving for excellence after some of the more recent balance patches, most of those weapons strike me as Not Great in Zones. I haven't been convinced to seriously pick up another weapon, so for this problem I think I just have to suck it up.

The objective of Splat Zones is to keep the Zones inked in your team's color, right? You can achieve that either by topping off the Zone with fresh paint or preventing the enemy team from doing the same. The latter path involves splatting the enemy, or at least manipulating their timing and/or positioning. This is about as complex as my understanding of Splat Zones strategy gets. Tower Control, to provide a point of contrast, is simple to understand. Everything revolves around the tower. Either you need to get on the tower or clear a path in front of it. If your team doesn't control the Tower, you need to get the opponent off of it. That's it. The singular moving part is the Tower.

Another possible reason is that my opinion on Turf War has gotten significantly worse since I started playing Splatoon. For a while, all I played was Turf War. Life was good, if a bit samey and boring. Then I dipped my toe into Anarchy Opens and found I like most of those modes better. Y'all already have thoughts about Turf War; I don't feel the need to repeat common complaints. Splat Zones feels a little bit like tiny Turf War: just as swingy, but with a much smaller portion of the map. On some maps, it feels like the stuff that isn't the Zone doesn't really matter.

I don't even like Zones in Side Order.

Spoiler: Are we still tagging Side Order gameplay spoilers?

I'll deal with the Flipper-Floppers in Salmon Run, but seeing all the little gushy guys "Zone lost!" me is where I draw the line. Curse you, Coverage Between Crosshairs, and those tall stages with high and low Zones too.

Finally, any Reef Cheese tips? I'm still working on my reasonable Dread Wringer build, but eventually I want to stack the various Special abilities into a BS build, blow up, and act like I don't know nobody. It probably won't improve my performance much (if at all?), I just think it would be funny.

 

[sevenleaf]

this makes… a lot of sense tbh. solo q zones (and even coordinated zones sometimes, if you’re not super intentional about planning and shot-calling!) can be rough as a non-painter because you’ve got to trust that your teammates are gonna paint zone while you’re trying to push up/go for splats, and sometimes that… doesn’t happen, whether it’s because everyone thinks they have something better to do than cap zone or because it’s hard to tell in solo q whether or not your efforts are helping or if even just one opponent slipped past your defenses and is presently doing to your teammates what you’ve been trying to do to the other team

i’m with you on zones being my least favorite mode but for different reasons: i just kinda find it less interesting than the other modes. like don’t get me wrong i still like playing it, but… i like the other modes more. i’m well aware i share this take with approximately zero high-level players but i am low level so i am allowed to have bad takes

(sadly as one of squidboards’ tetra guys my reef cheese strategy is ‘aim for the zone and hope’)

 

[OnePotWonder]

I could write a whole thread about my various opinions on the ranked modes. I've done a lot of thinking with regards to Splat Zones since I often found myself in a similar situation to this. I think the main problem with the mode is the unmoving, low-maintenance objective. In Tower Control or Rainmaker, a team has to effectively spawn camp with three out of four players in order to lock out the enemy team for a knockout. In Splat Zones, a team can lock out from mid, and no player needs to dedicate themselves to the objective.

These aspects of Zones combined make the mode the most lockout-heavy in the game, which is only exaggerated by lack of coordination in solo queue, and being locked out is simply not fun.

You know what? I'm going to make a thread praising Clam Blitz. It has literally none of the issues of the other ranked modes.