splatoon’s ability system

[chaotik0]

i dont really like it that much, but i also cant think of how it can be changed. at the very least i hope for a chunk shop and more special abilities, like the ones that can only go on the main slot like LDE and haunt and stealth jump.

i am interested to hear how other people think of this system and what they want to see!

 

[missingno]

I'm not a fan of grinding and I'm not a fan of min-maxing. I'd honestly prefer if I just... didn't have to think about any of this.

 

[ThestralZ]

Next game should definitely have 3 pts. of the utility subs (sub def. ink res. intensify, qsj, and special saver) built into your base character and have the 6 pt. benefit only activates when you have 6 pts. worth of subs on your build.

 

[Flango]

The intensify action and special saver are gear dependancy things, the point of them being there is you have to make a choice, are you really super jumping that much with the backliner for QSJ to be worth it? And are you dying enough for special saver? So removing them in that way would be a nurf to every weapon without that gear dependency, and would make gear builds a lot more boring.

 

[ThestralZ]

The intensify action and special saver are gear dependancy things, the point of them being there is you have to make a choice, are you really super jumping that much with the backliner for QSJ to be worth it? And are you dying enough for special saver? So removing them in that way would be a nurf to every weapon without that gear dependency, and would make gear builds a lot more boring.

If you have 9 slots for ability subs, and a general build need to use 5 of those to be on equal footing with other weapons, I'd argue that utility subs discourage unique build combinations, especially because of main specific abilities. Pretty much every weapon in the game benefits significantly from every utility sub, because the benefits those abilities give are helpful to every weapon in the game. If you make every weapon come with those benefits, you make every weapon feel better to play. And if certain weapons enjoy a sub more then others, you scale the gear curve accordingly like with blaster and intensify, so that their benefits after the built in sub are lesser.

 

[RubberCF]

The intensify action and special saver are gear dependancy things, the point of them being there is you have to make a choice, are you really super jumping that much with the backliner for QSJ to be worth it? And are you dying enough for special saver? So removing them in that way would be a nurf to every weapon without that gear dependency, and would make gear builds a lot more boring.

I agree about ia and ss, but ink res and special saver get too much value nit to be used by default on the vast majority of weapons, ur basically only working with 51 ap of abilities usually not 57 bc ink res and qsj are more or less assumed

 

[RubberCF]

I'm not a fan of grinding and I'm not a fan of min-maxing. I'd honestly prefer if I just... didn't have to think about any of this.

Fortunately you dont have to, its fairly optional.

 

[RubberCF]

Imo there should be a way to see the actual numerical effects of gear in game, and gear should be entirely free to customize. Or at very least, you should be able to freely costumize for testing purposes, and chunk requirements should be reduced.

 

[vitellary]

i don't think they should change the default amount of special saved just because losing exactly 50% by default is very logical and intuitive. they should maybe just nerf how effective 1-2 subs of it is, so that if you really want the bonuses of special saver you have to invest more resources into it, since i don't really think it's quite on the same level of ink resistance or quick super jump of "the game feels bad to play if you don't have it"

similarly it would be pretty dumb to make the player have some sub-resistance by default, because like... why wouldn't they just change the amount of damage the subs do directly? making the player inherently have a small amount of damage resistance would make everything extremely unnecessarily confusing, because that effectively means bombs do more damage in the training room than they'd actually do in a match
though that being said, my own take is that damage resistance abilities (excluding ink res since that's more movement-related than damage related) are dumb and shouldn't exist. we've gone from Defense Up in splatoon 1, to Bomb Defense Up in splatoon 2, and now Sub Resistance Up in splatoon 3, and they've all gradually become less effective than their predecessor, and i think that's because it's just a flawed idea in the first place. if the devs don't want 3 hits of a fizzy bomb to be lethal, then they should just change its damage, rather than make it so that it can be safe if you happen to have even a single sub of this ability. it's a really bizarre way of balancing sub weapons that feels like it's done just so they don't have to commit to a big change more than any real balancing reason, and i would be very pleased if splatoon 4 entirely scraps sub resist in favor of just tweaking any damage values they don't like

aside from that i generally like the system and think it's pretty cool. i wish food tickets were more reliable at providing certain abilities, but i think the rate you're able to get them feels fine enough. i don't think there's any particular abilities i think need to be nerfed directly (other than maybe special saver like i mentioned earlier, but i think that's better for a new game because of how much current gear is built around it), but it would be nice to see eg. stealth jump's effect is partially applied to regular jumps too so that it's less necessary to run stealth jump, and for thermal ink to get buffed to apply to more indirect sources of damage like blaster indirects. also i don't like respawn punisher and will be very happy if that ever gets reworked or replaced

 

[RubberCF]

Next game should definitely have 3 pts. of the utility subs (sub def. ink res. intensify, qsj, and special saver) built into your base character and have the 6 pt. benefit only activates when you have 6 pts. worth of subs on your build.

Sub resistance tbh is not ubiquitous enough to warrant it being default, its honestly super overrated bc people think its the same as bomb defense from s2

 

[ThestralZ]

i don't think they should change the default amount of special saved just because losing exactly 50% by default is very logical and intuitive. they should maybe just nerf how effective 1-2 subs of it is, so that if you really want the bonuses of special saver you have to invest more resources into it, since i don't really think it's quite on the same level of ink resistance or quick super jump of "the game feels bad to play if you don't have it"

similarly it would be pretty dumb to make the player have some sub-resistance by default, because like... why wouldn't they just change the amount of damage the subs do directly? making the player inherently have a small amount of damage resistance would make everything extremely unnecessarily confusing, because that effectively means bombs do more damage in the training room than they'd actually do in a match
though that being said, my own take is that damage resistance abilities (excluding ink res since that's more movement-related than damage related) are dumb and shouldn't exist. we've gone from Defense Up in splatoon 1, to Bomb Defense Up in splatoon 2, and now Sub Resistance Up in splatoon 3, and they've all gradually become less effective than their predecessor, and i think that's because it's just a flawed idea in the first place. if the devs don't want 3 hits of a fizzy bomb to be lethal, then they should just change its damage, rather than make it so that it can be safe if you happen to have even a single sub of this ability. it's a really bizarre way of balancing sub weapons that feels like it's done just so they don't have to commit to a big change more than any real balancing reason, and i would be very pleased if splatoon 4 entirely scraps sub resist in favor of just tweaking any damage values they don't like

aside from that i generally like the system and think it's pretty cool. i wish food tickets were more reliable at providing certain abilities, but i think the rate you're able to get them feels fine enough. i don't think there's any particular abilities i think need to be nerfed directly (other than maybe special saver like i mentioned earlier, but i think that's better for a new game because of how much current gear is built around it), but it would be nice to see eg. stealth jump's effect is partially applied to regular jumps too so that it's less necessary to run stealth jump, and for thermal ink to get buffed to apply to more indirect sources of damage like blaster indirects. also i don't like respawn punisher and will be very happy if that ever gets reworked or replaced

That's fair, I guess I just want the next game to have more substantial feeling gear, because right now it feels like my gear doesn't impact my game play at all. Side Order really showed me what gear could be in the next game, and I really hope they introduce some of the pallets like shot spread reduction and a nerfed version of Squid roll attack.

 

[youre_a_squib_now]

Although I do agree the balance of some abilities needs adjusted, I think the rest of the gear system is fine. It encourages you to be creative with using gear you already have. If you could change the abilities for free then there's kind of no point to the gear system at all because at that point it's basically the same as just assigning points to different values. I personally have never grinded for gear in my life, because I just used two gear pieces that got me close to what I wanted to do and used chunks on the third to fill in the gaps.

 

[RubberCF]

That's fair, I guess I just want the next game to have more substantial feeling gear, because right now it feels like my gear doesn't impact my game play at all. Side Order really showed me what gear could be in the next game, and I really hope they introduce some of the pallets like shot spread reduction and a nerfed version of Squid roll attack.

I think gear is fairly impactful but i also get what you mean in how gear should be more impactful. To an extent i agree, but are problems that arises from abilities meaning more. Firstly, the nature of the gane changes to emphasise abilities more, which for some might be interesting, but not for those who dont like to worry about gear much.
The second issue is that if the effects are big enough/you introduce new ones, it messes with what you can reliably expect the enemy to be able to do. A lot of individual strategy and skill depends on you being able to know how fast the enemy can kill you, their range, size of lethal aoe, etc. Abilities as they currently are dont affect this much but hypothetical new abilities could.

 

[Driftwood]

Next game should definitely have 3 pts. of the utility subs (sub def. ink res. intensify, qsj, and special saver) built into your base character and have the 6 pt. benefit only activates when you have 6 pts. worth of subs on your build.

This technically works but I think requiring 6 points to get additional benefit (only on utility subs) overly complicates an already opaque system that a lot of people don't really understand as it is. You could just as easily change the ability curve so that the first sub doesn't have much of an effect.

I kind of think that it's impossible to reduce the need for utility subs without nerfing them (which this kind of this does as I'll explain in a moment). Technically there is nothing wrong with not running utility subs in the abstract, it's just that they are so relatively cheap that pretty much everyone (who understands the gear system) will take them, which puts you at a disadvantage if you don't. You don't really need utility subs unless everyone else has them too.

Giving everyone free utility subs is really equivalent of reducing those negative effects (reducing jump rng, ink damage etc). But if you do either of those things people will still want to run utility subs since they are cheap and they would still get value from them. The only way to stop this is to nerf utility subs so that one sub doesn't really net you very much.

 

[DzNutsKong]

First off, since there'd be no better place for me to talk about this, can I just say that I freaking LOVE Opening Gambit? I don't use it very often but playing it basically turns a Splatoon match into a game within a game. It pushes people to think more opportunistically while obviously there's going to be a line you need to be careful not to cross here. Gotta play aggressive enough to keep it active, or at the very least go crazier than usual with Point Sensors, but if you're inexperienced or get pressured easily it's very easy to be too aggressive and take fights that aren't difficult to punish. Super unique take on an ability that encourages people to be more thoughtful. Not super good balance-wise but really sick and always a blast to use.

Is it a hot take to say that I like a lot of the things about the gear system's balancing? Stealth Jump being completely mandatory on like 90% of weapons as a main ability is kinda lame and a lot of the primary-only gear abilities feel very undertuned but otherwise I have little to complain about. It feels like a majority of gear abilities at least have some sort of place, including the weaker ones, and I like how they added curves to everything to disincentivize running just your utilities + one other ability for everything else. We're not realistically going to see a gear system where every ability is equally viable, we clearly have stronger ones but they're not mandatory for every weapon outside of the utilities that haven't felt horrible to slap in although that might be because I'm a privileged Shooter player lmao. Gear dependency is a weakness I'm totally fine with some of the stronger main weapons having although I do think some weapons are handed it unfairly and I really like how some weapons are given good gear stacking to give them a little something extra like with Splatlings and Run Speed.

The one thing I can say is that I didn't really play Splatoon 2 and hear that gear diversity was better in that game. Can anyone confirm this and maybe explain why? Beyond Shooters being basically the only viable weapons of course, those do tend to be more lenient even in this game and really shouldn't represent all of Splatoon 2 for this conversation. Otherwise yeah the grindiness sucks, yeah the mechanics to everything are a bit poorly-explained, yeah there's still some useless abilities...a lot of that feels like it's been said to death and I feel it's more fun to talk about the better things this system does.

 

[Driftwood]

I kind of wish you could swap abilities on between two pieces of gear (so for instance if there is a piece of gear you like with an ability you don't you could swap abilities with a piece of gear you don't like with an ability you do). I don't think they will every do this though. To be a little cynical, making farming abilities so grindy is probably done on purpose so that people will play the game more.

 

[ThestralZ]

This technically works but I think requiring 6 points to get additional benefit (only on utility subs) overly complicates an already opaque system that a lot of people don't really understand as it is. You could just as easily change the ability curve so that the first sub doesn't have much of an effect.

I kind of think that it's impossible to reduce the need for utility subs without nerfing them (which this kind of this does as I'll explain in a moment). Technically there is nothing wrong with not running utility subs in the abstract, it's just that they are so relatively cheap that pretty much everyone (who understands the gear system) will take them, which puts you at a disadvantage if you don't. You don't really need utility subs unless everyone else has them too.

Giving everyone free utility subs is really equivalent of reducing those negative effects (reducing jump rng, ink damage etc). But if you do either of those things people will still want to run utility subs since they are cheap and they would still get value from them. The only way to stop this is to nerf utility subs so that one sub doesn't really net you very much.

Build Analyzer | sendou.ink

Detailed stats for any weapon and build in Splatoon 3.

sendou.ink

You can look at a graph for the effectiveness of each ability, and for the majority of them, they are exponential decay, meaning you get a lot of bang for your buck early before slowly getting less and less. This is a balancing decision. For example, one sub of swim speed still makes you feel faster, but running all swim speed doesn't make you go mach 5, just around mach 3. The problem is that because the gear abilities aren't and can't be balanced effectively to each other, one sub of certain abilities are better than others (utility subs). I think a solution to this would be making the graph not be exponential decay but instead be a bell-curve, that way one sub doesn't give a disproportionate benefit while still making sure maxing out on one ability doesn't make you God.

 

[Driftwood]

Build Analyzer | sendou.ink

Detailed stats for any weapon and build in Splatoon 3.

sendou.ink

You can look at a graph for the effectiveness of each ability, and for the majority of them, they are exponential decay, meaning you get a lot of bang for your buck early before slowly getting less and less. This is a balancing decision. For example, one sub of swim speed still makes you feel faster, but running all swim speed doesn't make you go mach 5, just around mach 3. The problem is that because the gear abilities aren't and can't be balanced effectively to each other, one sub of certain abilities are better than others (utility subs). I think a solution to this would be making the graph not be exponential decay but instead be a bell-curve, that way one sub doesn't give a disproportionate benefit while still making sure maxing out on one ability doesn't make you God.

Yeah that's what I was thinking too (though I didn't really explain it). The way the curve works currently would have to be changed for this to work. Maybe not a bell curve though, but just have a utility ability have small effect with the first sub and then with the second it jumps up to where the curve is currently.

 

[Driftwood]

Yeah that's what I was thinking too (though I didn't really explain it). The way the curve works currently would have to be changed for this to work. Maybe not a bell curve though, but just have a utility ability have small effect with the first sub and then with the second it jumps up to where the curve is currently.

Actually the more I'm thinking about it, the more I think this is probably an overly complicated fix that doesn't address one of the problems. Really, the big issue with utility subs is that some weapons are so gear dependant that after accounting for that plus utility subs there is little room for experimentation (whereas other weapons don't have this issue). If they rebalanced those gear dependant weapons so they were less restrictive it could be enough.

 

[OnePotWonder]

I'm mostly fine with the ability system in S3, but there are a few changes I'd like to see:

• Stealth Jump nerf increasing the visibility radius (because Drop Roller is more fun and should be equally good).
• Quick Super Jump and Ink Resistance Up having the effects of 3 AP be default.
• Tenacity reworked to give Quick Super Jump to teammates jumping to the user.
• Thermal Ink actually working for AoE damage.
• Haunt/Respawn Punisher rework disabling gear abilities for 10 seconds after respawning instead of increasing respawn time.
• Intensify Action decreasing mid-air charge penalty.
• Ability to trade 2 ability chunks for 1 chunk of a different ability.