-sharp inhale-
The E3K was broken, i absolutely agree with that. But it was broken in the sense that it did one thing and it did it entirely too well, which is in terms of attack power. It was dominant in handling threats from all ranges, but it had one problem: it's inking capacity sucks terribly.
You could place one on one team, and you'll suddenly have a lot more offensive power over any other charger. But stack two, and suddenly the E3K is a lot less threatening. Three and you're about as effective as an entire team of Aeros. With that little inking capacity, the E3K cannot fight for perch, nor ink, nor can it handle threats at all because it doesn't have that map control anymore to utilize it's perches nor an ability to force people out from hiding aside from Echo.
E3K is a dominant force in the Splatoon 1's meta, but it's far from the only one and people overestimate it far too much. .96 Gal Deco, Zink, .52 Gal, Luna Blaster, Tentatek and the regular Splatterscopes were also very dominant alongside the E3K. Comparing it to the meta of S2, and it's usually one or two weapons. Once it was Tri, then Aero RG.
Now compare it with the pre-patch Tri. There are actual tournaments being won with 3 Tri's on one team, you want to know why? With the absence of long-ranged weapons, the Tri did everything with flying colors. You had a weapon that could kill like crazy, had superb range for it's ttk and had the ability to decently ink turf with it to boot. Combined with a then cheesy armor special and a complete absence of any ranged weapons in the meta and you can shamelessly stack that to 3 and win tournaments with it.
People keep saying not to think with rose-colored glasses but in all honestly you couldn't pick a team with three E3K's in S1 and win.
I'd elaborate a bit further on this matter but i accidentally hit the post button because i'm dumb and i can't delete posts lol
People complained and complained and complained (and complained) about E3K. Technically with dmg+burst bombs it was a little OP in the way some players ignored the main gun entirely and just mained burst bombs making it a mega-blaster type weapon instead of a charger, however later on they did patch burst bombs to not be quite so abusable. That's what made it OP. Nobody once complained Custom (my old main) was OP except whiny people we were sick of getting over-sniped. As a CEliter/sploosh/krakon/hydra/bambi main in the first game, I never once had serious problems dealing with enemy eliters. Granted that was with some knowledge of weaknesses from maining it, but I could easily grab my sploosh or roller and torment/destroy eliters. It wasn't hard. It wasn't hard to avoid getting hit by one (laglaser aside which still isn't addressed in S2, it's just been moved to other weapons)
It was not a hard weapon to avoid or to take out. It was a good anchor to a team however as part of the group. But somehow they listened to this endless complaining and decided to annihilate the entire weapon class. Not just eliter but all range.
And yeah, I recall the misery of a 3-charger team in S1....."good times." Though it was still doable moreso than S2. I actually won occasional all-charger matches.
Flash forward and we have a new eliter that paints really well....and does little else well :P In part because of the way the maps are designed as saber said. With most ranged vantage points cut off, and few choke points to entrap enemies to have to fall into your line of sight if they take that route, you have to frantacally sweep wide from odd angles to squids that can jank anywhere. Why try and miss 5 shots with an eliter as the squid keeps janking in an open field when you can just run up with a sploosh or ttk, or bucket and blow him away in half the time, and be out of the way and running someone else down by the time the eliter can start charging a second try?
I admit it's dampening my hydra enthusiasm when it does arrive.
I still think all these weapons are scapegoats for the games two real problems that they refuse to acknowledge as actual problems. Yes the map design breaks range. Yes there are too many weapons that can't ever possibly be balanced equally. But why did they nerf range to begin with? Because those weapons were scapegoats for the games utterly shamefully broken netcode that Nintendo wants to sweep on the rug because they probably don't even know how to fix it having designed everything around Japan's LAN-like internet. In S1 it was the laggy dynamo. It DID need to be nerfed. Not because Dynamo was OP but because the lag made it an insta-death magic wand you couldn't avoid. A good weapon had to be nerfed because of the effect lag had on it (sorry L_D, it's just plain true! ;) ) Chargers seemed like magic killers because you could get hit while the laser is pointing elsewhere entirely. The problem isn't limited to those weapons. "ohko splattershot" was a meme...it still is. But those weapons made it obvious more. Because lasers and the splash wave of dynamo etc made it so obvious something was wrong people blamed those weapons exclusively and demanded nerfs. The data on the server side certainly would corroborate that outrage...those weapons were racking in kills and winning matches. So they decided powerful range weapons are a problem and should be hindered. The problem is then when you get a low-lag lobby those weapons are a lot less intimidating. So they disappeared fast in Japan, and then disappeared in S2 by nature. The problem is still there, people just don't recognize it easily.
....yesterday I saw a baller roll up, hold still, I died, ink surrounded the ball, and then the detonation sound and animation played......When tentabrella came out I was testing in TW with a friend quite a few time zones away.....who kept splatting me with bubbles that would kill me very noticeably before the bubbles actually burst and before the shot to burst the bubble was fired. I've been watching missed charger shots in the new video reply feature....sure enough I fired where it should have hit, it just didn't. You can't play a game you can't see. The game internals remains severely broken....lag should never allow you to die from a weapon that, on your end, hasn't even fired yet.... That's in addition o the roller who was rolling BEHIND the ink trail forming ahead of him, and would roll me over before either his ink or his roller got near me....it was merely TW but it hints and what lurks within the game's handling of things.) There's the players passing right through my bomb undamaged. There's players I hit that I probably shouldn't have. It works in my favor from time to time too, but less often. There's the rubber-banding....most obvious in rollers, where they are rolling, the seem to stall or their ink trail gets ahead of them, and then they move at sanic speed for a while to catch up. This is racing game, specifically kart, netcode. A shooter just can't work properly with that design. The game does a fair job at hiding it and masking it, and at the speed of the game, most people don't notice. What you start noticing after a while is almost always if you notice a laggy player, that's the player dominating on their team and finishes with inordinately more kills than anyone else. A permanent invincibility ability will do that :P
This is where S2 is getting frustrating. It still has the terrible matchmaking of the first game that doesn't seem to pay nearly enough attention to team comp. But now the early problems with the netcode that haven't been addressed have produced outcry about OP weapons that were not OP without lag, and now they've modified the maps and the weapon abilities, to fix the "imbalance" of the OP weapons that were never actually OP but were the most visible at showing something amiss when lag interfered.
And here we are in a game of only aeros, buckets and ohko splattershots as a result :P I imagine the game plays very differently over LAN. I can't help but wonder if the meta would look the same in such an environment (and if they didn't muck with the weapons due to the false feedback of lag.) The Japanese meta should give us at least some clue about that, but even that's with the altered map design.
*IF* that rumor of dedicated servers is true with the paid service, the meta might end up revamping massively and a major rebalance would have to take place. The netcode will still be broken but the dedicated servers would manage it better between clients. Trouble is I, and probably many others will be totally burned out and done with the game after dealing with 6+ months of the all-short-range meta.
@Elecmaw
If you click edit you can add more to your post to elaborate further or you could double post, but I do agree with you any more than 1 charger on a team even in Splatoon 1 and the team with the 1 charge had the bigger advantage.
People cried that it was OP and in some wayshow it played was genuinely unfair but to strip a whole class of weapons in very unessecary.
@Award
You bring up smash 4 as a source of balance...I respect that, but don't forget the long road it took to get there between the overpowered Diddy long and Shiek to the reign of bayo and "pocket cloud" these game especially those in the process of adding content can't be easily balanced.
I hate to say it, but this is going to take some time and it is likely there will still be a few problems afterward, let us hope they make the necessary changes to the game to make it less broken and still keep it enjoyable. (or just burn Moray that would work too)
Splatoon 2 isn't really an all new game so much as it is a continuation of Splatoon 1. More weapons different maps, but it's the same game and modes, just with different balance patching. It's a "sequel" as far as shooters go, but it's not like Brawl to SSB4 as a wholly different game underneath. The lessons learned from S1 needed to be part of that long road of balance. Instead of tuning it they went to the drawing board and decided chargers having actual sight lines and choke points was a bad thing :P TBH, faster charge times are probably the only real fix available. I don't mean 1/64 second improvements. I mean improve it by 20-60%. They can't really fix the maps or the speed buffs or the doge rolls anymore, and they aren't going to add dmg up. All they can do is make it easier for chargers to take and miss more shots to better compete with spray & pray weapons. And put the *$($#@ travel time back where it was with hitscan. What's the point of a charger if after your 40 minute chargeup it takes 5 minutes for the shot to actually hit someone that creates a sonic boom every time they jog, while even the SSP now shoots way faster than that? Right now there's absolutely no reason to actually choose a charger unless you just like chargers because you played them before. I'm seeing more tubers these days, so the charger meta is probably moving there. I have seen few eliters, and occasional kelp. Even squiffer is largely absent now. The kit is likely killing it. Pro is rare. Splatlings, duelie squelchers, and occasional jets are about all the range I normally see.
Your'e right about the new content. Much as I like "keeping it fresh" and I defended it for that reason, Im starting to think one weapon a week for a year was ultimately not healthy for the game if the balance it creates is this. I liked the idea, but it's making the meta so iffy. I can understand spacing out maps to a degree. It allows the maps to really be memorized as they come out so everybody is on the same page. But the weapons...they probably should have had nearly all the classes out of the gate and then tuned alt kits over the year so they could collect main weapon data from them all interacting and catch problems early on .
