Some of the feedback we’ve gotten on the VER10 open playtest was that the roles no longer felt as distinct as they used to. In this post we’ll look at some of the changes that went into the September roster update to bring some of that distinction back.
Originally VER10 ported over the VER9 Roles almost exactly, with some minor tweaking since the Melee stat was now split between Melee ATK and Melee DEF. This worked out well initially, but as VER10 progressed through the prototyping stage and we started honing in on balance, we had to revise roles quite a bit.
A lot of our balance focus was based around the interactions with the Counterattack option. We wanted to keep ATK & DEF bonuses for most units with performance parity to be very close, so whether or not you landed a decisive hit depended almost entirely on lucky the dice rolls were for you and your opponent. Typically, units with equal performance the Attacker had a net +1 or +2 Hit, but the Defender (Mobile Suits at least) had a +2d10 additional dice to roll, it made for some very fun games and made Counter very difficult to land unless there was a strong power disparity between units or the unit had pilot traits specifically built around counterattacking.
We made this work by adjusting all the roles very close to how they were in VER7. While VER8 and 9 eventually saw the primary attack bonus for many roles go up to +3, in VER7 most units with +2 while a few like Sniper types were +3. It worked well, but as some players have mentioned in their feedback, it does feel a little samey.
With VER10 unifying attack and melee mechanics, on offense a role like Raid being +2 Shooting, +1 Melee, feels very similar to a Battler which is +2 Shooting and +2 Melee, especially if the Raid type is higher performance, it’s stats will more or less mirror the battler role. So we adjusted our weighting for various stats and tried to increase the variance between roles. It’s still a work in progress, we may see roles like Raid and Attacker trade some more offensive power for additional movement but that will come further down the line.
One thing we did notice in rebalancing the VER10 roles, was that while Raid emphasized shooting and evade and attacker emphasized melee and evade, that left Interceptor in a bit of an odd position where to stand out it emphasized Evade and Melee Defense. Given that many of our Interceptor units like the Nemo, GM Custom and forthcoming Jegan (and later Jesta) were units that were often guarding the ship or a Gundam, the stat choice made sense. But it was a bit odd for the GM Light Armor and GM Intercept Custom this role was made for, since they are more about hit and run tactics primarily relying on shooting.
So we decided to build a different role for interceptor focused on Shooting and Evade and not much else. We then recycled the Evade & Melee Defense focused profile into the “Guardian” role. This role will be ideal for Super Robots like the Yuusha / Braves series that depicts giant sentient robots defending Earth, it’s also a nice way to differentiate similar units like Shin Mazinger compared to the Toei original. Lastly, it finally gives a role for the GM Guard Custom that never really fit into any role before. Overall, we’re pretty happy with it. Hope you enjoy!
MechaStellar 