Weapon Choices in Turf Wars

[16bitdave]

any bucket for me. I'm a bucket kinda guy

 

[SupaTim]

The objective is covering turf, so weapons which cover turf, will be more favored then weapons that do not. Even if your team is heavily pressured, ink coverage has far more value than, for example, an opponent with a 50-0 KDR.

Unless the majority of the opposing team is really good at killing your turfing weapon from range...

It doesn't matter how well you ink turf if you are always getting splatted. You'll constantly be respawning and not helping at all. Kills matter. I've been very successful with the splattershot pro, which isn't a great turfing weapon. But, if I kill two or three of the enemy, I can still claim a lot of turf and be in a better position to cut them off when they do respawn.

 

[Vitezen]

During this Splatfest, I decided to take note of the weapons I saw. I only used the weapons on the team I was playing against, so I couldn't count for weapon success, only frequency of use. Below are the results.

Spoiler: Splatfest Data

The column on the left is percentage times the weapon was used out of all weapons. I recorded 104 matches total, so that's out of 416. The right is percentage teams that had at least one of the weapon.

The biggest personal surprise was how common the TTK was. I use that weapon pretty regularly, but I ended up switching it out to the custom jet squelcher because I was always losing fights with Nzaps. Guess it was just an error on my end.

 

[SupaTim]

Wow.

Yeah, that top 5 is basically the Turf War meta.

I'm actually surprised the dual squelcher is in the top 10, well above the NZap 85.

 

[Professional_Inkbrusher]

With the upcoming Splat Fest, I thought now would be as good a time as ever for this topic.

When playing Turf Wars, there is a constant debate in my mind between the two ways to influence the outcome of the game: inking the ground, and preventing the enemy from doing the same.

Weapons such as the Splattershot and Jr. have no trouble surviving in this mode. They can fill both roles. But while there are weapons that can perform well in each area, there are also exceptional cases.

First, there are weapons that excel in killing but not necessarily in inking. These are weapons such as blasters and chargers. These weapons still see play in TW though.

On the other hand are weapons that I'll see very frequently in TW, but disappear outside of this mode. Here I'm referring to the Aerosprays, Nzaps, and Inkbrushes. It's no secret why the people who equipped these weapons made their choice. While they may not be the most reliable for combat, these weapons are excellent at quickly covering ground, and also as support for when combat inevitably occurs.

However, the question I think needs to be discussed is which of these options, if any, should be more heavily favored in weapon selection when playing TW. It's important to identify whether or not the choice of equipment was a factor in a loss or victory. Should players choose to use weapons that can cover as much turf as possible at the expense of combat utility? Or stop enemy aggression from the start, and take advantage of area control and stronger firepower to deny them the ability to recover?

I haven't seen threads like this that analyze TW from a more competitive perspective. I recognize that due to the structure of TW it's inherently anticompetitive, but that doesn't mean that the same rigorous mindset can't still be applied to the mode in order to find a way to minimize variance. A way to think of it would be TW is a game like poker, while ranked modes are similar to games like soccer, the difference being the amount of randomness involved and the uncertainty of the results. You can't get the perfect hand every time in poker, but you can learn statistical analysis and bluffing in order to minimize losses due to randomness.

I see the same thing as well. I main the Inkbrush as my weapon choice and it excels at inking turf for me (1300+ without the 1000pt win bonus) but I think that you are slightly mistaken when it comes to Inkbrush users being useless in combat. It is true that the rage is very limited (being only 10/100) and being exceptionally weak, but you did not mention how quickly any experienced inkbrusher can attack. They attack very quickly and often, the opponent will panic and get stuck in the ink that the Inkbrush sprays out and will get splatted quickly. Although Inkbrushes are pretty awful for face to face combat,they are amazing at stealth combat, which is more common in turf wars, as everyone is focussed on inking turf, not on splatting foes. Overall i would rate the Inkbrush a 9/10 for all that I have explained above