Would Wave Breaker be overpowered if it couldn't be broken?

[NumberOneAries]

I'm genuinely curious about this because the special itself is so underutilized and undertuned, and I genuinely don't know of any other way to make it better. The special doesn't last for too long and the waves are still small, albeit still tricky if you're fighting around it.

If anyone has a better idea, I'd like to know, but I honestly can't think of any reason why it'd be game breaking. If anything it'd just be a better special with the same weaknesses just minus one tragic flaw.

 

[missingno]

I think that still wouldn't even make it good. The problem with Wave Breaker isn't shredding it, it's that it doesn't have much of an impact even when it isn't shredded.

 

[Mp3]

When you hit a wave you slowly take damage until you die or submerge in ink
That could help

 

[NumberOneAries]

When you hit a wave you slowly take damage until you die or submerge in ink
That could help

That does seem like an interesting mechanic. Lingering damage would be something good for the special to help it stand out more.

 

[DzNutsKong]

Honestly? I don't think so. Jumping is just way too low-commitment in this game and when you do get hit it's not that bad for most weapons. Even with sharking weapons it's often possible for me to jump behind cover and basically end up completely unaffected. If you do get hit then the team with the Wave Breaker still needs to be ready to follow up on it, and maybe it's easy at a higher level but I can't see it being any better for that than a majority of other specials in this game.

 

[woomy.exe]

Whenever a team I'm fighting places one, it's often ignored anyway, so I don't think so. I rarely see people trying to shred one, nor do I myself try to shred them, so I think it wouldn't change much.

 

[Vidknight]

As someone who plays a wavebreaker weapon. The special would need a lot more than not having the ability to be broken. One problem with the special is that it's just underwhelming. You pop it and the enemy team can usually ignore it most of the time. Even in the rare scenario where it does something it is at best a mild inconvenience for sharking weapons or dualies. Players overtime gotten better at avoiding wave breaker so I think it would need something like the waves being taller and harder to jump over. That really the only thing I can think of besides from just outright increasing the damage.

 

[vitellary]

it wouldn't be overpowered but it would definitely be less interesting, and shouldn't be the solution to making it good even if it would work. i think the reason wavebreaker is such a good special conceptually is that you have a lot of options for how to counterplay it, but they all involve revealing yourself and being disadvantaged when fighting in some way; spending time attacking it to shred it is one of those strategies. imo it should be significantly harder to shred it (the fact that splatanas can get rid of it before it even gets a single wave out is absurd), but should still be a viable option

if they make every individual wave much more threatening, then i think the special could get away with taking 1/3rd as much damage as it does now, as removing just one wave out of its 3 could mean a lot more. they could give it some breaking animations similar to crab tank to make it so it doesn't feel like your damage is doing nothing too (though this is well beyond the scope of a simple patch and is honestly unreasonable to expect any time before splatoon 4 potentially brings it back). damage scaling would have to stay as it is now if it's placed on a tower though because it would make it extremely good at body-blocking

 

[OnePotWonder]

I have a half dozen ideas for buffing the special. The most outlandish is probably making it so each wave is accompanied by the same location ring that appears when the special is placed, locating enemies that jump over the waves, albeit for less time. This would, of course, do virtually nothing to salvage the special, but it’s just a example of how creative the buffs for this thing could be.

Unbreakability wouldn’t make the special overpowered, but it would be a buff in the wrong direction. As others have stated, Wave needs to be more threatening to have more of an impact. Buffing the special’s resilience is basically akin to Reefelider and Ink Vac’s Zone Cheese™ buffs. It doesn’t address the real problem with the special.

My idea for buffing the special, as of now, is increasing its wave damage to 60 and making the delay between its waves 30% smaller, as well as increasing the wave height by 50%. A lot of buffs, but all of them reasonable.

 

[sevenleaf]

i'm not good at the whole 'hypothetical game changes' thing, but reading through this thread has made me try and think about why big shots in salmon run and (sometimes) wave breaker-esque effects in singleplayer feel more threatening than wave breakers in pvp, and the two times wave breaker-like effects in other modes stand out to me as more threatening are:

• when there's more than one big shot alive and they're shooting cannonballs in slightly different spots at slightly different times
• Alterna 01-10 Deadly Dance Hall—Jump, Jump!

reflecting on this, i think the solution is Triple Wave Breaker. (no, probably not)

 

[C-53]

I like the thought of changing the wave breaker itself, rather than its effect (more damage seems good, but boring).

Making it indestructible would result in less-interactive play patterns instead of more interactive ones. I would rather give people more incentive to destroy it, by making it more of a specific threat.

I might give it a mild attractive force that wanes over time. It would only pull in opposing players (no objects or teammates). With this, it becomes harder to time jumps over the waves, and harder to fight when you are near it.

This is OP, but it would be wild if players got briefly stuck to it (or maybe just slowed down) if they make contact with the wavebreaker. I would kind of like to see this in a challenge to watch people throwing these things at each other.

If it were tuned well, though, an opposing player might always have a split-second to decide whether to destroy it or run away.

The player deploying it either gets to take free space via displacement, or they can commit to an advantaged fight, or they can rebalance a disadvantage to enable safe retreat.

This is why wavebreaker’s concept is so cool and really deserves some kind of buff. The player doesn’t get immediate free splats, they don’t get massive hp or invulnerability, and they don’t lose access to their main weapon for an extended period. The player/team is/are just a stronger version of themselves while the special is active.

I really do wish this special were a bit better.

 

[Grushi]

There should be a challenge where wave breakers one shot and you get like 20 of them per game, that's all I got to say

 

[Azhdarcho]

I’ve always taken Wave Breaker to be something of a spiritual successor to Echolocator, but I never played a Splatoon 1, so I don’t know how true that is. If that is true, is there something we could do to make it more like that? Like, you always get marked by the wave, but you don’t take damage if you jump?

 

[OnePotWonder]

I’ve always taken Wave Breaker to be something of a spiritual successor to Echolocator, but I never played a Splatoon 1, so I don’t know how true that is. If that is true, is there something we could do to make it more like that? Like, you always get marked by the wave, but you don’t take damage if you jump?

Echolocator located every member of the enemy team, and that’s all it did. Its main utility was as a virtually instant ink tank refill. Wave Breaker’s most recent buff seems to be an effort to make it more like its predecessor.

To be honest, more better location is not what the special needs. Echolocator was (presumably, I’m not super versed in S1 meta) bottom tier if not the worst special in that game, so making Wave more like it is unlikely to make it better.

 

[missingno]

According to ProChara's tier list, Echolocator was mid. He put Killer Wail, Inkstrike, Seeker Rush, and Burst Rush below it. As far as kits go, Bento Charger is meta, and E-Liter saw some niche use.

Tbh the real problem with Echolocator was simply that it wasn't Kraken or Bubble. The power gap between those two specials and everything else was huge.

 

[Yeenom]

I think it should vary it's waves. It should have a good amount of patterns it can use instead of the single predicable 3 slow waves. Maybe there can be a pattern with faster waves, one with one big wave, one with varying wave heights. The main issue with Wave is that it's too predicable, it's only used in a few situations and even in busy areas which it works best in, it's entirely evaded by just... jumping and depending on the stage or placement you don't even have to do that simple task.

 

[ThestralZ]

Heyo, resident RB and CJR player. I've also had this same idea, and I have mixed feelings about it.
I've always seen Wave as a defensive special personally. To me its job is to be like a sentry gun. It sits there creating a hazard while you play off that hazard to control space. If you set up wave in an area that you don't control it should get destroyed. Personally, I would buff Wave by mostly buffing its offense and not by buffing its health to an insane degree. A Wave should not be able to withstand a full team push if the rest of the team is also dead. I think what I would do is buff Wave so it has maybe 50 more health, but then make it so stacking SPU increases the damage of the waves instead of the size of the shockwaves, as well as giving a reasonable buff to the base size of the shockwaves. I think by making the special more offensive it will stop single players from just destroying it and force more coordination. It also remains fair for the other team too, because bad Wave placement will still result in an easy destruction of it, which will encourage Wave users to find new and creative spots to place it (also Nintendo still hasn't fixed some of the jank of Wave shockwaves not going uphill, so it'd be nice if they fixed that).

 

[QuagSass]

Honestly, just something as simple as letting the waves travel upwards more would help a lot. As is, there are only a precious few good Wavebreaker spots on each map. And while I think that is a fun part of the special, learning the good spots, I do think it should have more of them. Avoids it being so predictable.

I do love Wavebreaker tho, it has so so much synergy on vHeavy. The location effect, the chip damage, the meat shield, the fact that it's a deployable.
It's practically the main's ideal special, it's just so undertuned right now.